Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century 9781644532355

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Making Ideas Vısible in the Eighteenth Century

Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Art and Culture Series Editor: Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, State University of New York Series Advisory Board: Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware; Martha Hollander, Hofstra University; Christopher M. S. Johns, Vanderbilt University; William Pressly, University of Maryland; Amelia Rauser, Franklin and Marshall College; Michael Yonan, University of Missouri

Selected Titles Jessica L. Fripp · Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France Marika Takanishi Knowles · Realism and Role-Play: The Human Figure in French Art from Callot to the Brothers Le Nain Julia A. Sienkewicz · Epic Landscapes: Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Art of Watercolor Tilden Russell · Theory and Practice in Eighteenth-Century Dance: The German-French Connection Paula Radisich · Pastiche, Fashion, and Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects: Looking Smart Christine A. Jones · Shapely Bodies: The Image of Porcelain in Eighteenth-Century France Jean-François Bédard · Decorative Games: Ornament, Rhetoric, and Noble Culture in the Work of Gilles-Marie Oppenord (1672–1742) Amelia Rauser · Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints Alden Cavanaugh, ed. · Performing the “Everyday”: The Culture of Genre in the Eighteenth Century William L. Pressly · The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare’s “Fine Frenzy” in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art Charles A. Cramer · Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 Susan M. Dixon · Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and Its Garden in Eighteenth-Century Rome Dorothy Johnson, ed. · Jacques-Louis David: New Perspectives Amy S. Wyngaard · From Savage to Citizen: The Invention of the Peasant in the French Enlightenment

Making Ideas Vısible in the Eighteenth Century Edited by

Jennifer Milam & Nicola Parsons

Newark, Delaware

This collection copyright © 2021 by the University of Delaware Individual essays copyright © 2021 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact University of Delaware Press, 200A Morris Library, 181 S. College Ave., Newark, DE 19717. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor University of Delaware Press are responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscripts were prepared. udpress.udel.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ^ The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. First published 2021 ISBN 978-1-64453-232-4 (casebound) ISBN 978-1-64453-233-1 (paperbound)  ISBN 978-1-64453-234-8 (epub) ISBN 978-1-64453-235-5 (web PDF) 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title. A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. Composed in Monotype Bell (designed by Richard Austin, fl. 1788–1830) Book design by Robert L. Wiser, Silver Spring, MD Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

Table of Contents Acknowledgements · vii List of Illustrations · ix

Introduction · Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons The Potential Vısibility of Ideas in Enlightenment Art and Aesthetics · 1 Chapter 1 · David Maskill A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century · 11 Chapter 2 · Jessica Priebe Inventing Artifice: François Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre · 31 Chapter 3 · Matthew Martin Continental Porcelain Made in England: The Case of the Chelsea Porcelain Factory · 59 Chapter 4 · Jennifer Milam Planting Cosmopolitan Ideals: Thomas Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest · 79 Chapter 5 · Jessica L. Fripp Growing Old in Public in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Thérèse Geo∑rin and Marie Leszczyn´ska · 111 Chapter 6 · Wiebke Windorf French Funerary Monuments of the Ancien Régime as the Product of Individual Artistic Solutions · 135 Chapter 7 · Melanie Cooper Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries · 159 Chapter 8 · Jennifer Ferng Infernal Machines: Designing the Bomb Vessel as Transnational Technology · 185 Notes on Contributors · 209 Index · 213

Acknowledgements

his volume originated with the XVth David Nichol Smith conference at the University of Sydney in 2014, which occasioned this opportunity for art and architectural historians to discuss what, how, and why ideas became visible during the long eighteenth century. Since the 1960s, the David Nichol Smith seminar—or more informally “DNS”—has fostered cross-disciplinary exchange between scholars working on the long eighteenth century in Australia and New Zealand. Most recently, art and architectural history has secured a prominent place in the DNS program. As at similar conferences in North America and Great Britain, namely the annual meetings of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies and the British Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, the visual has proven to be an area of keen interest to scholars working on the Enlightenment. DNS is named in honor of Professor David Nichol Smith (1875–1962), who was Meriton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Educated in Scotland and France, he developed a connection to Australia in the 1950s when he was a visiting Professor of English at the University of Adelaide. Shortly thereafter, Nichol Smith made it known that he wished to have his substantial holdings of research materials lodged with an antipodean institution to support scholarship on the eighteenth century. The National Library of Australia in Canberra subsequently purchased the Nichol Smith Collection in 1962 and four years later convened the first David Nichol Smith seminar. While there were already a number of established scholars in Australia and New Zealand researching aspects of the eighteenth century, the acquisition of the Nichol Smith Collection, combined with the creation of a new seminar dedicated to eighteenth-century studies, was a tremendous boon to the field. Over the years, the seminar has grown into an international conference, taking place every few years, over several days, with well over one hundred participants from around the world. The strength of the Nichol Smith Collection is materials pertaining to the study of English literature, and perhaps for this reason, DNS was originally dominated by this discipline. In recent times, however, the conference has attracted scholars with a vast range of historical interests in the areas of politics, economics, philosophy, science, art, architecture, and garden design.

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acknowledgements This volume represents the stimulating contribution of scholars working on topics related to the visual arts at DNS XV, which also hosted the inaugural meeting of a revitalized society for eighteenth-century studies in the region, the Australian and New Zealand Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ANZSECS). In addition to the resources generously contributed from the University of Sydney by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the Faculty of Architecture, the School of Literature, Arts and Media, the Power Institute, and the Sydney Intellectual History Network, DNS XV was sponsored by the National Library of Australia, the Australian Garden History Society, and the Ian Potter Foundation. We are particularly grateful to William Christie, Jennifer Ferng, and Mark Ledbury for their e∑orts as members of the conference organizing committee. Without their input into the conference program, this volume would not have come into being. The theme of DNS XV was “Ideas and Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century.” It was an appeal to rethink the history of Enlightenment thought and creativity, acknowledging the full range of cultural practices and intellectual pursuits in which ideas developed and took root between 1660 and 1815. The interdisciplinary depth of the conference confirmed that scholars within eighteenth-century studies understand “ideas” as a diverse and complex topic, appropriate to the diversity and complexity of thought during the Enlightenment itself. A special issue of Eighteenth-Century Life⁄ brought together a selection of papers delivered at DNS XV in the fields of literary and historical studies. It acts as a companion volume to this publication. Together, the writings in that issue and in this collection are testament to the global interest in eighteenth-century studies, with substantial crossdisciplinary exchange furthering the discipline in regional locations. With the formation of ANZSECS, DNS is now convened as the society’s conference. We dedicate this volume to the members of ANZSECS who share an interest in the visual culture of the eighteenth century. 001 “Ideas and Enlightenment” special issue, eds. Jennifer Milam and Nicola Parsons, Eighteenth-Century Life 42, no. 2 (2017).

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List of Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Charles Grignion, after William Hogarth, Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, May 7, 1761. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Digital image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 0.2. Charles Grignion, after William Hogarth, Tailpiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, May 7, 1761. Etching and engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Digital image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figures 1.1–1.2. Unknown draftsman, The Lodgings of the Galleries of the Louvre and the Names of the Individuals Who Occupy Them, c. 1710. Pen and ink. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. © Bibliothèque nationale de France. Figure 1.3. Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Attributes of the Arts and Their Rewards, 1766. Oil on canvas. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 1.4. Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 1739. Oil on canvas. Museu Calouste Gulbenkian. © Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon. Photo: Catarina Gomes Ferreira. Figure 1.5. François II d’Orbay, Cross-Section of the Grand Gallery and the Lodgings Below (with the principal rooms of the Tocqués’ apartment identified), 1692. Pen and ink. Detail from Plan of the Ground Floor of Part of the Grand Gallery in Recueil du Louvre, vol. 2, folio 42, recto. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre). Figure 1.6. Louis Tocqué, Portrait of Jean-Marc Nattier, late 1740s. Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Given by Colonel and Mrs. Jacques Balsan, 1955. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. Figure 1.7. Louis-Jacques Cathelin after Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 1773. Engraving. British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 2.1. François Boucher, The Artist Inspired by Venus, c. 1760s. Drawing, 17≥ ¤ 12Δ in. (45 ¤ 31.8 cm). Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais/Jacques Quecq d’Henripret.

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illustrations Figure 2.2. Plan de la premier piece de l’attelier de Mr. Boucher au Louvre, 1752. Pen and ink. Archives nationale de France, Paris. O/1/1907/139. © Archives nationales (France). Figure 2.3. Plan au premier étage, de la distribution du Louvre, dans son état actuel, 1756. Etching on paper. In Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Françoise, vol. 4 (Paris: Jombert, 1756), plate 6. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Public Domain. Photo: www.gallica.bnf.fr. Figure 2.4. Claude-André Bouchet after François Boucher, Design for a Vase, c. 1738. Etching and engraving. In Livre de vases par François Boucher (Paris: Chez Huquier, 1738–49), plate 12. Collections Jacques Doucet, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. © Institut national d’histoire de l’art, bibliothèque. Figure 2.5. François Boucher, Fire, c. 1740. Red chalk drawing, 13≥ ¤ 11‹/• in. (35 ¤ 28.8 cm). Van Day Truex Fund, 1984. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Digital image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 2.6. François Boucher, Chinese Botanist, 1738–45. Etching on paper, 8 ¤ 5≤ in. (20.5 ¤ 13.4 cm). In Recueil de diverse figures chinoises du cabinet de François Boucher peintre du roi dessinées et gravées par lui-même (Paris: Chez Huquier, 1738–45). Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Digital image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 2.7. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, after Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Frontispiece to a Sales Catalogue, 1757. Engraving. In Pierre Rémy, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux, estampes, coquilles et autres curiosités, après le décès de feu Monsieur Dezallier d’Argenville (Chez Didot: Paris, 1766). Collections Jacques Doucet, Bibliothèque de l’INHA, Paris. © Institut national d’histoire de l’art, bibliothèque. Figure 2.8. François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1740. Oil on canvas, 51⁄/• ¤ 63≥ in. (130 ¤ 162 cm). Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Photo © Erik Cor nelius/Nationalmuseum. Figure 3.1. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, The Vırgin and Child, c. 1755. Soft-paste porcelain, 8≤ in. (21 cm) high. The David Roche Foundation, Adelaide. Figure 3.2. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c. 1761. Soft-paste porcelain, 15⁄/• ¤ 11≤ ¤ 9 in. (38.5 ¤ 28.5 ¤ 22.8 cm). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, D2–1989. Figure 4.1. Monticello, Virginia. Author photo. Figure 4.2. Poplar Forest, Virginia. Author photo. Figure 4.3. Montpelier, Virginia. Author photo. Figure 4.4. Poplar Forest, view from the loggia of the south facade. Author photo. Figure 4.5. Poplar Forest, roof of the wing of o≈ces. Author photo. Figure 4.6. Poplar Forest, terrace access door from bedroom (interior side). Author photo.

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illustrations Figure 4.7. Poplar Forest, terrace access door from bedroom (exterior side). Author photo. Figure 4.8. Poplar Forest, view toward the Blue Ridge Mountains from the roof of the wing of o≈ces. Author photo. Figure 4.9. Montpelier, 1837 insurance map showing relationship between terrace corner and South Yard from “Between the Mansion and the Field: A House-Based Archaeological Investigation,” Montpelier Foundation Technical Report Series, 2011. Author photo. Figure 4.10. Montpelier, side terrace to South Yard. Author photo. Figure 4.11. Montpelier, view from side terrace down to South Yard. Author photo. Figure 4.12. Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville, President James Madison’s House in Montpelier, Vırginia, 1818. Musée franco-américain du château de Blérancourt, Blérancourt, France. Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Château de Blérancourt)/Gérard Blot. Figure 4.13. View from the roof of Monticello, across the South Terrace, the first roundabout, Mulberry Row, and the kitchen garden. Author photo. Figure 5.1. Louis Surugue after Charles Coypel, La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse, 1745. Etching. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 5.2. Jean-Marc Nattier, Madame Geo∑rin, 1738. Oil on canvas. Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo. Figure 5.3. Gilles Demarteau after Charles Nicolas II Cochin, portrait of Madame Marie Thérèse Rodet Geo∑rin, 1770 (original drawing 1742). Crayon manner etching. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Figure 5.4. Pierre Allais, Madame Geo∑rin, 1747. Oil on canvas. Private Collection. Photo: Studio Sebert. Figure 5.5. Carle Van Loo, Marie Leszczyn´ska, 1747. Oil on canvas. Musée national des château de Versailles et de Trianon. Figure 5.6. Jean-Marc Nattier, Marie Leszczyn´ ska, 1748. Oil on canvas. Musée national des château de Versailles et de Trianon. Figure 5.7. Élisabeth Lépicié after Charles Coypel, La Jeunesse sous les habillements de la Décrépitude, c. 1750. Etching. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Figure 6.1. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe, 1753–76. Saint-Thomas, Strasbourg. Image source: Wissenschaftliches Bildarchiv für Architektur, Berlin. Figure 6.2. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe (detail), 1753–76. Saint-Thomas, Strasbourg. Image source: © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Fotograf: unbekannt; Aufn.-Datum: 1926. Figure 6.3. Michel-Ange Slodtz, Funerary Monument to the Archbishops Armand de Montmorin and Henri-Oswald de la Tour d’Auvergne, 1740–43, 1747 in situ. Saint-Maurice, Vienne, France. Image source: Photograph by Jürgen Wiener, Düsseldorf.

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illustrations Figure 6.4. Gianlorenzo Bernini, Funerary Monument to the Countess Matilda of Canossa, 1633–37. St. Peter’s, Rome. In La basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano—The Basilica of St Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. Antonio Pinelli (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2000), vol. 2: Photo-Atlas, vol. 2, 809, fig. 1097. Figure 6.5. William Kent (design); Michael Rysbrack (sculptor), Funerary Monument to the First Duke of Marlborough, 1736. Chapel of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. Image source: Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Photograph by A. F. Kersting. Figure 6.6. Johann Schütz (design); Thomas Heilmann (sculptor), Funerary Monument to the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden-Baden, 1751–53. Stiftskirche, Baden-Baden. Image source: Photograph by Kurt Gramer, Bietigheim-Bissingen. Figure 6.7. Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger, Monument to Louis XV for Rennes, c. 1748. Terracotta. Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Rennes. Image source: © bpk/RMN- Grand Palais, Musée des BeauxArts Rennes/Louis Deschamps. Figure 6.8. Domenico Guidi, Funerary Monument to the Cardinal Lorenzo Imperiali, 1674. Sant’Agostino, Rome. Image source: Archivio Fotografico Soprintendenza Speciale per il Polo Museale Romano. Figure 6.9. James Gibbs (design); Michael Rysbrack (sculptor), Funerary Monument to Matthew Prior, 1723. Westminster Abbey, London. Image source: © Dean and Chapter of Westminster. Figure 6.10. Alessandro Algardi, The Meeting between St. Leo the Great and Attila, 1646–53. St. Peter’s, Rome. In La Basilica di San Pietro in Vaticano—The Basilica of St Peter’s in the Vatican, ed. Antonio Pinelli (Modena: Franco Cosimo Panini, 2000), vol. 2: Photo-Atlas, vol. 1, 557, fig. 717. Figure 7.1. Gérard Jean-Baptiste Scotin, illustration for Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Paris: Chez Saugrain l’aîné . . . Charles Estienne Hocherau, 1724), vol. 3, 19, plate 20. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Figure 7.2. Portraits Flanked by Two Botanical Drawings, n.d. Watercolor and collage. In Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, c. 1817–18, bound with ‘An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales’ . . . (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Call no. SAFE/PXE 1072 IE 470724. File no. FL471283. Figure 7.3. Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People with Beach and River Inlet and Distant Aboriginal Group in Background, n.d. Watercolor and collage. In Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, c. 1817–18, bound with ‘An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales’ . . . (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call no. SAFE/PXE 1072 IE 470724. File no. FL471456.

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illustrations Figure 7.4. Vıew of Awabakal People, n.d. Watercolor and collage. In Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, c. 1817–18, bound with ‘An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales’ . . . (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call no. SAFE/PXE 1072 IE 470724. File no. FL 471451. Figure 7.5. Vıew of a River Landscape with Five Cut Out Pasted Down Drawings of Five Standing Aborigines, n.d. Watercolor and collage. In Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, c. 1817–18, bound with ‘An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales’ . . . (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call no. SAFE/PXE 1072 IE 470724. File no. FL 471460. Figure 7.6. Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People, n.d. Watercolor and collage. In Album of Original Drawings by James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, c. 1817–18, bound with ‘An Historical account of the colony of New South Wales’ . . . (London: Rudolph Ackermann, 1821). Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Call no. SAFE/PXE 1072 IE 470724. File no. FL 471446. Figure 8.1. Willem van de Velde, A Dutch Two-Decker and Galjoot Lying-by with the Fleet at Sea, 1672. Oil painting, 11 ¤ 16Δ in. (27.9 ¤ 41.9 cm). National Maritime Museum, Caird Collection, Greenwich, London. Figure 8.2. Salamander, 1730. Scale 1:48. Black ink, green ink, pencil, red ink on paper, 18≤ ¤ 25‡/• in. (46.5 ¤ 65.7 cm). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Figure 8.3. Granado, 1742. No scale. Black ink, red ink on paper, 18 ¤ 29 in. (45.6 ¤ 73.5 cm). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Figure 8.4. Serpent, 1742. Scale 1:96. Black ink, red ink on paper, 12fi/• ¤ 19‡/• in. (32 ¤ 50.5 cm). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Figure 8.5. Vesuvius, 1776. Scale 1:48. Black ink, green ink, red ink on paper, 21 ¤ 27≥ in. (53.5 ¤ 70.4 cm). National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. Figure 8.6. Battle of Copenhagen, April 2nd, 1801. In W. L. Clowes, The Royal Navy: A History from the Earliest Times to the Present, vol. 4 (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1899). Author photo.

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Figure 0.1. Charles Grignion, after William Hogarth, Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, May 7, 1761.

introduction

The Potential Vısibility of Ideas in Enlightenment Art and Aesthetics jennifer milam and nicola parsons

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n his preface to The Analysis of Beauty (1753), William Hogarth responded to a rhetorical question as to why painters had been silent about the subject of beauty, leaving discourse on the subject in the hands of “mere men of letters.” To this, Hogarth answered, “they arrived at that excellence in their works . . . without troubling themselves with a farther enquiry into the particular causes of the e∑ects before them.”⁄ Hogarth’s purpose was undoubtedly to set up his own authority as “one who never took up the pen before” writing a treatise on a topic that had begun to occupy the attention of philosophers and philosophes throughout Europe.¤ As a leading English artist with notable cosmopolitan interests related to the theorization of art, Hogarth provides us with an insightful perspective on the relationship between thought and art making during the Enlightenment.‹ His statements draw attention to the fact that eighteenth-century artists and writers understood that ideas had a potential visibility, and argued over who possessed the most authority in describing the nature of those ideas in visible form to a wider public. The issue of meanings that the wider public derived from works of art was of particular concern to art writers who took as their subject the spectacle of artworks enjoyed by large audiences at the biennial Salons in Paris.› In his opening remarks to Fredrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, prefacing the Salon of 1765, Denis Diderot noted that his ideas about painting and sculpture were developed through careful consideration of 1

jennifer milam and nicola parsons his response (and that of others, he claimed) to the visual. While he remarked on artistic terms that often appeared in theoretical art writing by artists and connoisseurs, his contention was that the technical components of an artwork remain “indistinct” until, through reflection, they take on “clear, fixed meanings” in the mind of the beholder.fi Diderot stated that he was primarily concerned with the task of description, but his larger project was to make individual artworks visible to his reader by expressing his ideas in response to any given painting or sculpture that he chose to critique or to praise. Although Diderot’s criticism has been a rich source of information on the subject of proposing a moral function for art and the social responsibility of artists as part of the Enlightenment project, what remains central to his perspective is that ideas have an inherent visibility, which artworks are able to bring out and develop as a form of communication in parallel to written and spoken language.fl What we witness during the long eighteenth century is a turn in art writing from the mechanics of art making to the processes of art viewing, to what Claude-Henri Watelet referred to, in his Essai sur les jardins (1774), as the “intelligent enjoyment of the agreeable arts.”‡ The emphasis shifted, in the minds of those writing about art, to the visibility of ideas. As Watelet put it, he and his friends, to whom he addressed his text, required not only an appeal to the senses, but also through that appeal “that the mind and the soul in turn be touched and stirred.”° Just how ideas became visible through the making of art and the visual experience of reception became a topic of concern, not only among those who had an interest in the philosophy of art and the emerging discipline of aesthetics, but also for artists themselves, who, as Hogarth suggested, sought to provide answers on or at least to explore such matters through visual means. Eighteenth-century theories of aesthetics found the traditional formulation of art as the imitation of nature to be limited.· Moreover, practices within art academies taught students to imitate the works of previous masters, not nature itself. The very training of artists relied upon copying poses, gestures, and expressions found in one subject and redeploying them successfully in the portrayal of another. In this way, the visual language found in narrative images of the Renaissance and Baroque masters was divorced from the defined content of specific texts. Forms were freely appropriated from an “original” image into an entirely di∑erent visual context of ideas.⁄‚ Joshua Reynolds in his 2

introduction Discourses directed students to reuse the inventions of earlier artists “in a situation totally di∑erent from that in which they were originally employed.”⁄⁄ Images, rather than texts, were an artist’s models, and this created a tension between word and image that eighteenth-century artists increasingly manipulated in their assertion of the visual independence of ideas. Yet for critics of academic art, men of letters like Diderot, their objection to these conventional academic practices was that the resulting images sacrificed an inherent “truthfulness” of representation. As art making increasingly engaged with the substance of contemporary social life, this much-lauded objective of “truth” in Enlightenment thinking about the relationship between nature and art was one based not on natural appearances in the visible world, but rather on sensibility and the ability to correlate concepts, as a form of understanding, with visibility. Aesthetic experience was “reconfigured” during the eighteenth century, according to Tom Huhn in his study of the fate of mimesis, “as a means by which the opaque nature of society might be formulated and figured.”⁄¤ Once Enlightenment philosophy constructed society as an ongoing project, aesthetic philosophy determined that social relations were subjective and could not fully disclose themselves in nature—they were invisible ideas that art making exposed to judgments (social and aesthetic). Hogarth’s Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibited in Spring Gardens (Figure 0.1) makes this point visually by mocking (and mimicking) traditional iconography, while simultaneously reinforcing the relationship between nature and art. In the image, Hogarth replaces the conventional allegorical figure of Grammatica with that of Britannia, who nourished the natural world from which branches of the visual arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture) blossom and grow.⁄‹ Society, nature, and art are shown to be fundamentally interconnected as a form of social production—much like the social life produced in the experience of visiting the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, where contemporary British art was exhibited and judged.⁄› The Tailpiece (Figure 0.2) to the same catalogue completes the lesson. A monkey in foppish dress waters dried-up potted plants labeled “exoticks.” Holding a magnifying glass, the figure apes the attitude of a connoisseur, elite and engaged in close looking, but unable to see that nothing grows from his attention. Comprehended as a counter-example to the hopeful future for the arts as patronized in Britain and allegorized 3

jennifer milam and nicola parsons on the front of the catalogue, Hogarth’s singerie image mocks an appreciation of art that follows the dictates of traditional mimesis—based on the imitation of past art that sought continually to improve upon nature through copying and judging the copy—but, in turn, misses the visual evidence of life in nature itself, causing the arts to shrivel and die.⁄fi For the visual arts to thrive, a return to nature as the ultimate source of life in motion was first required, then to be nourished by the British Crown and the society it supported. That very society was the audience to which Hogarth directed his visual lessons in the Frontispiece and Tailpiece : the British public, constituted in the audience at Vauxhall, who visited the Spring Garden specifically with the purpose of enjoying art at their leisure. In Hogarth’s aesthetic writings, the serpentine line therefore becomes a metaphor for articulating the underlying invisibility of nature that is imitated in the visual reception stimulated by art. Both exhibition and image set the eye in motion, thereby simulating the constant movement of nature and providing evidence of life itself within the visual experience. Yet it is the invisibility of the concept, stirred by the idea made visible, that is sensed by, and made sense of, through the imagination. These aspects of making ideas visible are at the core of Enlightenment debates about the purpose of art making in aesthetic understanding. Mimesis as practiced in academic art making of the time was not based on the direct relationship between visual representation and the natural object, but between visual representation and an idea of a particular subject. This was partly because artists were trained to follow a visual language of representation based on artifice. The received understanding of mimesis restricted art to the boundaries of nature rather than expanding on the possibilities of visual representation to direct the mind toward ideas. Many scholars of eighteenth-century art have commented on the tensions between word and image, or, as Norman Bryson described the problem, “the interaction of the part of our mind which thinks in words, with our visual or ocular experience before a painting.”⁄fl Nevertheless, we continue to uncover through the varied modes of art historical interpretation what Barbara Sta∑ord phrased as “the mindshaping powers of ocular” skills derived from the visual material of the Enlightenment. As Sta∑ord proposed over two decades ago, if we are to understand the impact of what she termed as an “eclipse of visual aptitude” in the story of Western civilization’s cultivation of knowledge, 4

Figure 0.2. Charles Grignion, after William Hogarth, Tailpiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, May 7, 1761.

jennifer milam and nicola parsons then we must push the history of aesthetics theory beyond studies that have primarily focused on textual evidence.⁄‡ We must introduce new visual materials and novel conceptual models into traditional accounts of the intellectual history of the Enlightenment. The essays in this collection take up these issues, not from the perspective of art writing in the eighteenth century, but through analysis of the specific ways that artworks during the Enlightenment conveyed ideas. In framing these discussions, the authors here consider the approach taken by individual artists and the material formation of concepts in di∑erent contexts by asking new questions of artworks that are implicated by the need to see ideas in painted, sculpted, illustrated, designed, and built forms. Individual essays address the visibility of ideas in a broad range of artistic, social, and historical contexts. In the first essays of the volume, David Maskill and Jessica Priebe explore the material and cultural world that artists created for themselves through the visual display of objects and artworks in their o≈cial lodgings at the Louvre. Both Maskill and Priebe assess the evidence of inventories to evaluate the social aspirations of two prominent eighteenth-century artists. Their mutual concern is with the artist’s sense of self. Using the examples of Louis Tocqué and François Boucher respectively, their essays reconstruct the meanings generated in these combined studio and domestic spaces that at once referenced professional achievements, personal networks, and standards of aesthetic taste. While in each case aristocratic conventions of furnishing and decoration were clearly followed, specific objects and modes of display are more telling of individual ambitions claimed visually in these sought-after working and living spaces frequented by other artists, patrons, and collectors. Identity formation is closely connected to a sense of self, with the visual contributing to the intellectual processes that informed both during the Enlightenment. In the third and fourth chapters, Matthew Martin and Jennifer Milam discuss the coexisting dynamics of cosmopolitanism and nationalism at work in the creation and reception, respectively, of English porcelain and American garden design. As part of his investigation into recusant art patronage and collecting of porcelain in England, Martin considers how ties of culture, language, and national and religious loyalties, along with the demands of business, created a complex interplay of contingent identities in the activities of London’s Chelsea porcelain factory. Milam, in turn, explores the experience of 6

introduction place at the plantation estates of Monticello and Poplar Forest, where Thomas Je∑erson sought to give physical form to his ambitious philosophical, political, and aesthetic ideals. Je∑erson developed garden spaces that simultaneously referenced his sense of himself as a cosmopolitan man and his identity as a Virginian landowner with a vision that included America’s past, present, and future. Following on from these discussions that consider artworks and garden designs as contributing factors to the development of English and American identity, in the next essays, Jessica Fripp and Wiebke Windorf explore the visual expression of ideas related to aging and death in French culture. Fripp proposes how the visual e∑ects of aging were seized by prominent French women in court and society circles. Focusing on two women who had what might be called a “public life”— the salonnière Marie-Thérèse Geo∑rin and the Queen of France Marie Leszczyn´ska—Fripp examines their decisions to dress as “old women” in portraits in the context of their public roles. While Enlightenment discourse around women’s aging provided new opportunities to harness the visual to make new and di∑erent claims about the role of women in society, challenges to the authority of religion presented a host of problems to be solved around the commemoration of “great men” at their death. Windorf focuses on artistic solutions, innovations, and stylistic features in a funerary monument by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, eschewing a more common emphasis on iconographic elements, to consider how ideas about posterity, a “this-worldly” afterlife, and mortality circulated visually through the medium of sculpture before they became concerns of Enlightenment writers. Exploration and technological advancement during the Enlightenment caused artists and artisans to respond to new ideas visually and to exchange thoughts about progress through pictorial means. In the seventh chapter of the volume, Melanie Cooper considers how European ideas about evolution were formed, in part, through visual material that sought to express a point of common origin from which wild or “savage” people could become more “civilized.” In doing so, European artists turned to what they knew, what Cooper terms “mythological hybrids,” to express cultural di∑erence witnessed in the Pacific and to distinguish its people from the polite society of Europe. Cooper proposes that, by drawing new ideas out of mythological figures borrowed from the conventions of past European art, printed images provided a visual explication of cultural progression set within eighteenth-century 7

jennifer milam and nicola parsons discourse on the topic. In the final essay of the volume, Jennifer Ferng explores the technological manifestation of ideas in built form. Her essay examines the invention and use of the galiote à bombe, or bomb ketch, to consider how the consequential mobility of ideas spurred intellectual exchanges between European countries that materialized in the form of technical adaptations to naval vessels. Naval architecture, as a product of cultural, economic, and political innovation, not only magnified the copying of ideas but also emphasized their transference from one cultural context to multiple others. These essays thus progress thematically in their discussion of how artworks during the Enlightenment conveyed ideas, radiating in concentric circles outward from the center point of the individual. We begin with analyses of how the material and cultural environment of artists informed their sense of self. Studies of collective identity formation, the public role of women and society, and the challenge to the authority of religion follow, widening the concentric circle of intellectual influence for the visible idea. Examinations of exploration in the eighteenth century, and of the ability of the visual medium to reconcile European ideas about evolution, extend our discussion beyond the public sphere to our final consideration, of the manifestation of ideas in built form, expressed through technology. In sum, the ability of the visual arts to express ideas ranging from those related to self-identification to those involving technology reinforces Diderot’s perspective that ideas have an inherent visibility, although in his writing, he refuted Hogarth’s challenge that only a professional artist can properly explain the nature of that visibility in visual form. 001 William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed. Ronald Paulson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 1–2. 002 Ibid. 003 On the relationship between Hogarth’s cosmopolitanism and his Englishness in his art writing, see Mark A. Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 23–41. 004 On the question of authority in art writing related to the Salons, see Jennifer Milam, “Art and Aesthetic Theory: Claiming Enlightenment as Viewers and Critics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment, ed. Daniel Brewer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 122–36. 005 Denis Diderot, Diderot on Art, trans. John Goodman, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), I: 3–4. 006 On the intellectual history of creative ideas, as practiced in the visual arts and music during the long eighteenth century, see Jennifer Milam and Alan

8

introduction

007

008 009

010 011 012 013

014 015

016 017

Maddox, “Visual and Aural Intellectual Histories: an Introduction,” Intellectual History Review 27:3 (2017): 285–98. Claude-Henri Watelet, Essay on Gardens: A Chapter in the French Picturesque, ed. and trans. Samuel Danon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 19–20. Ibid. Tom Huhn, Imitation and Society: The Persistence of Mimesis in the Aesthetics of Burke, Hogarth, and Kant (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004). Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 88–114. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. R. R. Wark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 221. Huhn, Imitation and Society, 5. Rudolf Wittkover, “‘Grammatica’: From Martianus Capella to Hogarth,” in Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987), 167–72. David Coke and Alan Borg, Vauxhall Gardens: A History (London: Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 2011). The Latin verse of the Frontispiece translates as “The hope of the arts, is in the patronage of the sovereign.” This contrasts with the Latin verse attached to the Tailpiece: “What shall we say of these? If fame is denied to the living.” John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated, 3 vols. (London: J & J Boydell, 1793–1811), 3: 93–95. Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5. Barbara Maria Sta∑ord, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Vısual Education (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994), xxii.

9

Figure 1.1. Unknown draftsman, The Lodgings of the Galleries of the Louvre and the Names of the Individuals Who Occupy Them, c. 1710.

chapter 1

A Good Address: Living at the Louvre in the Eighteenth Century david maskill

T

he tradition of granting living quarters beneath the Grand Gallery of the Louvre to favored artists and craftsmen began during the reign of Henri IV and continued until Napoleon evicted the last occupants in 1806.⁄ Painters, sculptors, goldsmiths, furniture makers, engravers, medalists, clockmakers, and other craftsmen and women were given lodgings in twenty-seven apartments under the long gallery. These lodgings or logements were highly sought after and it often took several attempts to secure one. Once secured, they provided free lodging for life. The twenty-seven artists’ lodgings ran halfway along the Grand Gallery from the point where it connected with the old Louvre to as far as the guichet Saint-Nicaise (Figure 1.1). As the plan of the various levels shows, each apartment was distributed over three levels with a mezzanine or entresol between the second and third levels and a cellar. Reading the plan, which dates to about 1710, from bottom to top, shows the cellars, ground floor, first floor, mezzanine, and second floor. A corridor at the first-floor and mezzanine levels linked the lodgings on the river side while the main entrance to each lodging was from the ground level on the opposite side via the rue des Orties. Apart from being granted free lodging for life, the occupants of the Louvre logements enjoyed immunity from certain taxes and, because they inhabited a royal residence, were not subject to the police jurisdiction of the city of Paris.¤ Each occupant was free to make modifications to the internal layout of their spaces with the result that each apartment 11

david maskill was articulated di∑erently, as the drawing of the various levels of the logements from about 1710 clearly shows (Figure 1.2). The costs of such refurbishments were borne by the occupant.‹ Although, thanks largely to historian Jules Gui∑rey, we know where the logements were situated and who occupied them, there has been limited attention paid to how these spaces were actually inhabited and used.› This is not entirely surprising given the di≈culty of reconstructing lived historical experience. Consequently, a detailed history of the artists’ lodgings has yet to be written. The pieces of evidence that do survive, such as architectural plans and probate inventories, need to be treated with care as they were not made with such a future reconstruction in mind. However, if they are interpreted carefully, they can provide microhistories of the lives of the individuals who lived and worked at the Louvre. One example, which is the focus here, is that of the royal portrait painter Louis Tocqué, who was granted a logement in the galleries of the Louvre in 1759 and died there in 1772. A detailed, but as yet unpublished, probate inventory survives that itemizes in detail the layout and decoration of Tocqué’s apartment as well as the material possessions of the painter and his wife. This document will be used here to attempt to reconstruct the way in which these individuals inhabited this prestigious space. In so doing, it becomes possible to gauge not only the material comfort and taste of the occupants, but also the manner in which they used their material possessions to demonstrate their social pretensions and their perceived status, and the professional and personal networks on which these depended. As a result of the research of art historian comte Arnauld Doria, we know a great deal about Tocqué’s life and career. From humble origins as the son of a guild painter, Tocqué rose to become a celebrated royal portraitist in Paris, Saint Petersburg, Stockholm, and Copenhagen.fi To Doria’s research can now be added an analysis of the painter’s probate inventory, which was unknown to Doria. Wherever possible, comparisons will be made with both Tocqué’s neighbors in the Louvre and other specialist portrait painters in an attempt to position him within his own socioeconomic and artisanal group. Before proceeding to examine the particular case of Louis Tocqué, some consideration of the prestige value of a Louvre logement should be given. Evidence of the prestige of a lodging in the galleries of the Louvre can be found in the di≈culty in securing one. As logements were accorded for life, vacancies were usually a result of the death of the occupant. 12

Figure 1.2. Unknown draftsman, The Lodgings of the Galleries of the Louvre and the Names of the Individuals Who Occupy Them (detail), c. 1710.

david maskill Often, a right of succession to a logement was granted to the widow or children of the deceased, especially if they practiced the same art. This made it all the more di≈cult for a newcomer to petition successfully for a lodging. Without family connections, and due to the irregular availability of a vacant lodging, chances for such an artist were slim. However, this did not deter individuals from repeatedly petitioning ministers overseeing the Louvre, often with almost indecent haste, upon the death of an incumbent. For example, Tocqué’s first attempt to secure a lodging was on hearing of the death of the engraver Pierre-Imbert Drevet. Tocqué’s request for help from a patron to persuade the minister at that time, Philibert Orry, to accord the vacant lodging to him was sent the day after Drevet’s death.fl Tocqué’s first attempt was unsuccessful. The vacant lodging passed by right of succession to the deceased’s nephew and fellow engraver, Claude Drevet. Tocqué’s contemporary, and fellow portrait specialist, JacquesAndré-Joseph Aved failed ever to secure a logement despite making repeated requests. In September 1759, he petitioned the minister, marquis de Marigny the day after the death of the royal clockmaker Julien Leroy in his Louvre lodging. Aved was to be disappointed, as the lodging passed to Leroy’s two sons, one of whom was also a clockmaker. In 1761, on the death of the medalist Jean Duvivier, Aved petitioned the minister again in a letter dated the day after the the demise of the incumbent. Again, he was unsuccessful, as the lodging passed to Duvivier’s son, Pierre-Simon-Benjamin, also an engraver of medals. These two failed attempts did not deter the portraitist. The following year, Aved again petitioned the minister in a letter dated the day after the death of the royal sculptor Edme Bouchardon. The minister’s response indicated that both Bouchardon’s vacant lodging and his pension were the preserve of sculptors.‡ Aved’s last and equally unsuccessful appeal for a lodging was occasioned not by the death of an incumbent but by the bankruptcy of the silversmith François-Thomas Germain in 1765.° What motivated Aved’s repeated attempts to secure a lodging was his expressed belief that such favor was due to him for his many years of membership to the French Academy. His appeals were not motivated by financial need. His probate inventory of 1766 shows that he was very comfortable, with a well-appointed apartement in the rue de Bourbon, which contained a picture collection of over 130 items valued at nearly sixty thousand livres. He also had a house in the village of Saintry-sur-Seine, near Corbeil-Essonnes, southwest of Paris.· 14

a good address Indeed, as Academy secretary Charles-Nicolas Cochin pointed out to Marigny in his comments on Aved’s final appeal, the painter’s comfortable situation meant that he was less in need of such royal favor than others. If the di≈culties in obtaining a royal lodging are not evidence enough of its prestige, further evidence is a∑orded by the two surviving autograph versions of Jean-Siméon Chardin’s Attributes of the Arts and Their Rewards (1766; St. Petersburg: State Russian Museum, and Minneapolis: The Minneapolis Institute of Arts) (Figure 1.3). When Chardin painted these two pictures, he had been the occupant of a royal lodging in the galleries of the Louvre for nearly a decade. He owed this favor to the support of his friend, Academy secretary Cochin, and to his position as treasurer of the Academy. The first version of the work was a commission from Catherine the Great for the Academy of Fine Arts in Saint Petersburg. Chardin painted a second version for his friend and neighbor in the Louvre, sculptor Jean-Baptiste Pigalle. Both versions feature a plaster model of Pigalle’s celebrated Mercury (1744; Paris: Louvre), one of which Chardin owned.⁄‚ In addition to representation of the art of sculpture connoted by Pigalle’s statue, the attributes of painting, drawing, architecture, and metalworking are all depicted, together with the sash and cross of the Order of Saint Michael, which conferred nobility on the recipient. This would have had a particular resonance for Pigalle, who was accorded this singular honor in recognition of his statue of King Louis XV at Reims. Although, he initially declined the honor out of respect for his elder colleagues, in May 1769, he became the first French sculptor to be admitted to this noble order. Similarly, the inclusion of the architectural plan in the foreground of Chardin’s painting may have been intended to stand for more than just the art of architecture. The plan shows what appears to be a long corridor or gallery with the masonry walls pierced by windows on one side. The version illustrated here also bears a painted inscription, “74 pieds 1 pouce” or “74 feet, one inch,” together with the representation of an architectural scale. It bears a striking similarity to the circa 1710 plan of the Louvre logements (Figure 1.1). It may also be read as a reference to the Grand Gallery itself, where the Academy staged its first exhibitions at its inception.⁄⁄ In this interpretation, it seems reasonable to propose that the plan might have signified to the observant viewer the prospect of securing both a privileged place to exhibit and an equally privileged place to live in the floors beneath the gallery, the most coveted rewards available to an eighteenth-century artist. 15

Figure 1.3. Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Attributes of the Arts and Their Rewards, 1766.

a good address When, on his third attempt, Tocqué was granted his lodging in the galleries of the Louvre in 1759, he was e∑ectively at the end of his distinguished career as a court portrait painter. The logement was accorded to him in recognition for his service at the court of Russia. He had first petitioned the minister back in 1739, the year the portrait of him was painted by his soon to be father-in-law, Jean-Marc Nattier (Figure 1.4). Again, in 1745, he made another attempt to secure a lodging, by which time he was a conseiller, or senior o≈cial, at the Academy. Again, he was unsuccessful. Finally, in October 1754, the opportunity to achieve a lodging presented itself when he was nominated by the arts minister, marquis de Marigny, to go to the court of Russia initially for eighteen months to paint the portrait of the empress Elizabeth Petrovna, but in fact this became twenty-five months. In a letter to Marigny, Tocqué outlined his terms for accepting the appointment. Claiming that he made an annual income of twenty thousand livres “without leaving my cabinet,” he sought a payment of fifty thousand livres from the empress, half in advance, to defray his costs and compensate him for the loss of work in Paris.⁄¤ After many months of negotiation, whereby Tocqué agreed to accept forty thousand livres, he and his wife departed for Saint Petersburg in May 1756 and did not return to Paris, following a further eight-month stay in Copenhagen, until June 1759.⁄‹ The royal warrant for Tocqué’s Louvre lodging was signed on April 8, 1759, once his portrait of the empress was completed, three months before his return to Paris.⁄› Tocqué received the tenth lodging in the galleries of the Louvre, which was liberated from the enamel painter André Rouquet when he entered the asylum of Charenton. When Tocqué and his wife, their eleven-year-old daughter, their cook, and their footman moved into the lodging in the summer of 1759, their immediate neighbors included pastelist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, painter Louis de Silvestre, and Chardin.⁄fi We have evidence for the general layout of rooms in Tocqué’s lodging, as provided by two plans—the plan dating from about 1710 (Figure 1.1), and one dating from 1692 by François II d’Orbay showing a profile of a Louvre logement (Figure 1.5). We also have detailed evidence of the furnishings in the form of the unpublished inventory drawn up at the time of the painter’s death in 1772 while still in residence at the Louvre. Taken together, these documents allow us a fascinating glimpse of the living space and material possessions of the artist. 17

Figure 1.4. Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 1739.

chambre de Mme Tocqué

chambre ou est décédé led S Tocqué

salle de compagnie

cuisine

salle à manger

Figure 1.5. François II d’Orbay, Cross-Section of the Grand Gallery and the Lodgings Below (with the principal rooms of the Tocqués’ apartment identified), 1692.

david maskill According to the Tocqués’ longtime friend, the engraver JeanBaptiste Massé, Madame Tocqué had the lodging decorated “magnificently and at a great deal of expense.”⁄fl This is clearly borne out by the description in the probate inventory. Such extensive redecoration would have been necessary on account of the sorry state in which the previous occupant, Rouquet, had left the apartment.⁄‡ According to depositions made by Louis de Silvestre, Jean Restout, Chardin, François-Thomas Germain, and de La Tour, Rouquet had almost set fire to his lodging to the extent that smoke had filled the corridor linking the apartments. He was also reported to have thrown bottles, household items, and pieces of furniture into the street below. So, the lodging that the Tocqués were given was clearly in need of refurbishment. Their arrival must have caused considerable relief to their neighbors. By all accounts, the Tocqués’ time in Russia and Denmark had left them financially secure.⁄° So much so that the painter was in the position to e∑ectively retire. He seems to have painted little and he did not exhibit at the Salons after his return to Paris. The unpublished probate inventory shows that there was no working space in the lodging, nor did he have a separate atelier, as did other artists with similar lodgings. While it is not to be expected that the elderly painter would have had a fully equipped studio operating at the end of his life, there is no mention made of brushes, pigments, canvases, or other tools to indicate that he once worked in the space at all. However, the inventory does confirm that the Tocqués were certainly comfortably o∑.⁄· The income from their annuities alone was 4,700 livres and Tocqué had an additional royal pension of six hundred livres a year. Along with their Louvre lodging, they rented a maison de campagne in Charonne to the east of Paris.¤‚ At the Louvre, the Tocqués created a space of considerable comfort, which displayed their taste, social status, and social aspirations. The entranceway to the apartment from the rue des Orties on the ground floor was a passage o∑ which were a kitchen and a small room where the footman slept. Beyond that was a dining room that looked out to the quay side, which was well appointed with large mirrors in gilt frames, several dozen glasses and porcelain plates, porcelain cups and saucers, and a table centerpiece for dessert decorated with porcelain figures and flowers. The household silver, comprising silver cutlery, serving dishes, and candlesticks was valued at over eight thousand livres—a truly astonishing sum.¤⁄ Dining at the Tocqués, with the meals prepared by the live-in cook, one Claire Leclerc, must have been 20

a good address a very splendid, and well-lubricated, a∑air indeed, as the description of one hundred empty wine bottles in the cellar attests. The main sitting room, or salle de compagnie, on the first floor overlooking the rue des Orties, was especially luxurious. There was a chimney overmantel decorated with two large mirrors in a gilt frame, and another wall panel with two mirrors and an additional pier glass valued together at over five hundred livres. There were eight silverplated candlesticks, a suite of nine giltwood armchairs covered with crimson damask and matching ta∑eta valences, a suite of four chairs covered with speckled satin, a rosewood-veneered chest of drawers described as a five-drawered commode en tombeau, a Turkish carpet, and a porcelain potpourri mounted in gilt bronze. The windows overlooking the rue des Orties were covered with curtains of striped Indian tafetta on a crimson background. Such a coordinated decorative scheme indicates careful planning and considerable expense. The total valuation of the furnishings in this room amounted to an impressive 1,345 livres. The use of crimson damask, the color and fabric habitually used for the winter furnishings in aristocratic townhouses further indicates the social aspirations, one might even say pretentions, of the Tocqués. As their inventory was drawn up in mid-winter, it is possible that this furnishing would have been replaced during the summer months. However, there is no description in the inventory of any summer furnishings in storage. Although the works of art owned by the Tocqués were inventoried separately, as was the custom, they are listed according to the rooms they furnished, so it is possible to reconstruct their layout with some certainty. On the walls of the main salon were family portraits—Nattier’s portrait of Tocqué from 1739 (Figure 1.4), together with Tocqué’s own sketch for the portrait of his father-in-law (Figure 1.6). Nattier copied his portrait of Tocqué as his admission piece for membership in the Danish Academy and Tocqué used the sketch of his father-in-law as the model for his own admission piece to the same body. Also in this room were two terracotta portrait busts, one of Madame Tocqué and one of her daughter by Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne. Tocqué had known Lemoyne most of his life. He had painted the portrait of his father, Jean-Louis Lemoyne (1665–1755), as his reception piece for admission to full membership in the Academy back in 1734. And, it should be remembered that Lemoyne was the Tocqués’ next-door neighbor in the galleries of the Louvre. The sculptor could easily have visited his neighbors to make the preparatory drawings for the portraits or the subjects 21

david maskill could just as easily have sat for the sculptor in his apartment as he worked the wet clay from life. In addition, there was a portrait by Anthony Van Dyck valued at two hundred livres and a terracotta bust of Louis XV also by Lemoyne. Both had been bequeathed to Tocqué by his friend Massé, whose portrait Tocqué had painted in 1734. Also in this room was a framed and glazed print by Jean-Georges Wille after Tocqué’s portrait of the comte de Saint-Florentin. This had been one of Tocqué’s most notable portrait commissions of a non-royal subject. The painting and the engraving were commissions from the city fathers of Marseilles.¤¤ As the main reception room in the apartment, then, the choice of its furnishings and art was clearly designed to convey not only the taste (albeit quite conventional) and material comfort that Tocqué and his wife enjoyed, but also the network of professional and personal relationships the artist established and maintained over a long career. In the inventory of the bedroom on the third floor overlooking the Seine, where Tocqué died, we find a description of a luxuriously decorated room. There was a bed in an alcove with matching green ta∑eta curtains valued at the considerable sum of 240 livres. This was no ordinary bed, but a canopied bed typically found in aristocratic interiors.¤‹ There was a pair of large mirrors in giltwood frames, a shaped mirror above the fireplace also framed in giltwood, and a matching pair of commodes with marble tops. There were three pairs of chairs of di∑erent types all covered in green velvet to match the bed hangings, a chaise longue, a writing desk and chair, a pendulum clock by Le Beuf and a corner cupboard with a garniture of porcelain. Clearly this room’s furnishings were for more than just a bedroom in which one slept. The description of pairs of items and matching coverings indicates that this room had been furnished according to conventions of aristocratic taste. The largest number of paintings and prints were to be found in this room. Some were portraits of friends such as Wille’s engraving of JeanBaptiste Massé after Tocqué. In addition, there was an engraved portrait of Tocqué’s neighbor at the Louvre, La Tour. Of the most highly valued items, there was a glazed and framed drawing described as “after Nattier” valued at 160 livres and a pair of paintings by Alexis Grimou and JeanBaptiste Santerre described as “pendants” and valued at the same sum.¤› Most significantly in this room were paintings and prints of Tocqué’s most prestigious commissions. There were paintings of the Russian empress Elizabeth Petrovna and of the Young Pretender Charles Edward 22

Figure 1.6. Louis Tocqué, Portrait of Jean-Marc Nattier, late 1740s.

Figure 1.7. Louis-Jacques Cathelin after Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 1773.

a good address Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie. There was also an engraved portrait of the late Queen Marie Leszczyn´ska after Tocqué’s portrait painted in 1740, now in the Louvre. This had been one of the painter’s most demanding commissions and, at nearly three meters in height, was the largest canvas he ever painted. The head was painted from life on a separate piece of canvas that was then attached to the larger work. The queen sat for the head sketch in July 1739, and in September, the abbey of Saint-Denis lent the royal cloak to the painter for the duration of the commission. He was paid the sum of 9,300 livres for the original and one copy. The portrait of the late queen in Tocqué’s bedroom, therefore, attests to the painter’s membership in the very select group of artists who were commissioned to record the features of royalty from life and on a grand scale. So this room, then, with its aristocratic furnishings and its array of images, represented an eloquent microcosm of the painter’s career and aspirations. One can imagine the elderly retired painter receiving guests here announced by the footman, one Jacques Desain, and dressed in one of the gold embroidered suits itemized among his clothing, wearing the diamond ring specified as “for a man’s use” valued at over seven hundred livres, and o∑ering snu∑ from one of his gold boxes again described as “for a man’s use” and valued at four hundred livres.¤fi All this would have been while his royal sitters looked on from their giltwood frames. Visitors would be left in no doubt that they were in the presence of a man of standing and one accustomed to living well. Up until now, the focus has been on Louis Tocqué and his surroundings. But it should be remembered that it was Madame Tocqué who, according to Massé, was responsible for the redecoration of the logement. Marie-Catherine-Pauline was the eldest child of Tocqué’s teacher and mentor Nattier. In 1757, at the age of twenty-two, she married the fifty-year old Tocqué and the following year she gave birth to their only child, Catherine-Pauline. Theirs was, by all accounts, a close relationship. When Tocqué was called to Russia, he insisted on his wife accompanying him and delayed the journey for several months due to her ill health. With her beauty and wit, she proved to be a great asset during the couple’s travels in Russia and Denmark. When her father died in 1766, she completed his memoirs, which were then read by Cochin to assembled academicians. The death of her husband in 1772 provoked a particularly grand gesture. She commissioned from Academy engraver Louis-Jacques Cathelin a portrait of her husband based on her father’s portrait of him (Figure 1.7). The published work bears an inscription 25

david maskill that declares her husband’s professional status as a member of both the French and Danish Academies. She presented a framed and glazed impression of the print to the French Academy in 1773.¤fl This very public gesture by Tocqué’s widow demonstrating her commitment to her husband’s posthumous reputation seems to be entirely in keeping with the display of status found in their Louvre lodging. That it was e∑ected at precisely the time when she was obliged to vacate their prestigious address is also very telling. On Tocqué’s death, the lodging was reallocated to another royal portraitist, Alexandre Roslin (1718–1793), in March 1772. Madame Tocqué moved into a threeroom apartment in the convent of the Sisters of Notre-Dame de Bons Secours in the rue de Charonne, near the Church of Sainte-Marguerite, where she died three years later in 1775. Her probate inventory shows that she still lived in some comfort with her maidservant.¤‡ In the inventory of her papers, we find that there was a sale of her deceased husband’s e∑ects in April 1772 that raised over six thousand livres. The family portraits of her husband and father that had hung in the main sitting room in the Tocqués’ logement at the Louvre were now in her sitting room together with the harpsichord she had inherited from her mother.¤° Curiously, this instrument was nowhere mentioned in the inventory of the Tocqués’ Louvre apartment. Was Monsieur Tocqué immune to its dulcet tones? Or was it away being repaired, or was it already in the temporary possession of the Tocqués’ daughter, where it eventually found a home? Madame Tocqué had kept the lit à la polonaise she had at the Louvre, but it had been re-covered in a di∑erent color. Her household silver was valued at the considerable sum of 3,874 livres, just under half the value of the silver at the Louvre apartment. She had kept some books, her jewelry, and a gold box valued at five hundred livres. So, despite having to move from her spacious Louvre lodging, Madame Tocqué continued to live well. It appears that she was given no compensation for the expense of decorating the Louvre apartment by its next occupants.¤· Roslin and his wife Marie-Suzanne Giroust, who was also a painter and member of the Academy, were barely ensconsed in their Louvre lodging before Madame Roslin died in August 1772. This has been an attempt to reconstruct the material world of one eighteenth-century French painter and his wife during their time as occupants of a Louvre logement. A probate inventory gives us a detailed snapshot of a person’s material possessions at only one moment in their life. Drawn up for strictly legal purposes, such documents do not seek to 26

a good address provide evidence of the personal, emotional, and psychological conditions of a historical individual. And yet, as I have endeavored to show, taken together with other documentary sources and interpreted with care, they can o∑er us a richly detailed snapshot of these unique conditions. In the case of Louis Tocqué, we encounter a man of humble origins who rose to the highest standing that his chosen genre of portraiture allowed. His reward was a comfortable retirement at the very heart of the elite artistic world of the time—the palace of the Louvre.

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I wish to acknowledge Victoria University of Wellington for supporting this research. Jules Gui∑rey, “Logements d’artistes au Louvre,” Nouvelles archives de l’art français 2 (1873): 1–221. For example, Gui∑rey (as in note 1 above) tells us that, in 1617, occupants were exempted from guard duty on the city’s gates and, in 1648, exempted from paying poor tax and taxes for the upkeep of the city’s milestones, paving, and lighting. The Louvre residents came under the jurisdiction of the Grand Prévot de l’Hôtel du Roi, not the municipal police jurisdiction of the Châtelet. As such, they were e∑ectively immune to the control of the guild, or the maîtrise, so they could take on apprentices who could then become masters without the approval of the guild authorities. Gui∑rey, “Logements d’artistes au Louvre,” 17. The subject is given a cursory treatment in the new three-volume history of the Louvre, Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, et al., Histoire du Louvre, 3 vols (Paris: Fayard, 2016). However, it is becoming an increasing focus of scholarly interest. For example, see the brilliant essay by Katie Scott on Charles Coypel’s bed in his logement in the Louvre, “Parade’s End: On Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Bed and the Origins of Inwardness,” in Interiors and Interiority, ed. Eva LajerBurcharth and Beate Söntgen (Boston: De Gruyter, 2016): 17–48. The Fall 2016 issue of Journal18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture, “Louvre Local,” is devoted to the Louvre in the eighteenth century. See also Hannah Williams, “Le Louvre de Demachy: le Palais et son quartier au XVIIIe siècle,” in Le témoin méconnu: Pierre-Antoine Demachy 1723–1807, ed. Françoise Roussel-Leriche and Marie Petkowska Le Roux (Versailles: Musée Lambinet, 2014), 30–39, esp. 36–37, and Jean Nérée Ronfort and Jean-Dominique Augarde, “The Louvre Galleries,” in André-Charles Boulle 1642–1732: A New Style for Europe, ed. Jean Nérée Ronfort (Paris: Somogy, 2009): 19–29. Arnauld Doria, Louis Tocqué (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1929). Ibid, 50. Tocqué’s letter is dated April 28, 1739. Drevet died on April 27. “Lettres inédites d’artistes du XVIIIe siècle,” Archives de l’art français, nouvelle période 1 (1907): 1–106. The letters concerning Aved’s appeals for a lodging and a royal pension appear on 20–27. Ibid, 27. A detailed transcription of Aved’s probate inventory is published in Georges

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Wildenstein, Le peintre Aved, sa vie et son oeuvre, 1702–1766, 2 vols. (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1922), I: 202∑. A third version, as yet untraced, was exhibited at the Salon of 1769 under the title Les attributs des arts et les récompenses qui leur sont accordées. For a detailed discussion of the various versions of this work, see Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin 1699–1779 (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1979), 344–47. I am grateful to Hannah Williams for this insight. Doria, Louis Tocqué, 64. Tocqué’s reluctance to go to Russia would no doubt have been informed by the similar situation in which his father-in-law, Jean-Marc Nattier, had found himself years earlier. Having been engaged to work for the Czar, Peter the Great, during his European tour, Nattier traveled to Amsterdam in 1717, where he painted The Battle of Poltava (Moscow: Pushkin Museum of Fine Art). He was then commissioned to paint the portrait of Empress Catherine, for which he traveled to The Hague. He then returned to Paris, where he painted the portrait of the Czar. According to the biography penned by his daughter Marie-Catherine Pauline, the wife of Louis Tocqué, Nattier refused the o∑er to accompany the Czar back to Russia. See Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, ed. Louis Dussieux et al., 2 vols (Paris: Dumoulin, 1854), II: 348–64. Doria, Louis Tocqué, 78. Louis de Silvestre died in April 1760, less than a year after the Tocqués had moved into the lodging next door. His vacant apartment was accorded to the sculptor and friend of the Tocqués Jean-Baptiste II Lemoyne in June 1760. See Gui∑rey, “Logements d’artistes au Louvre,” 94. Doria, Louis Tocqué, 25. “Enquête sur l’état mental et les extravagances d’André Rouquet, peintre en émail du Roi . . . ,” in Jules Gui∑rey, “Scellés et inventaires d’artistes,” Nouvelles archives de l’art français, 2eme série, 5 (1884): 256–67. Rouquet died in December 1758 at the asylum of Charenton. His probate inventory shows that he had occupied only two floors of the Louvre lodging. The valuation of his e∑ects amounted to only 768 livres. See Archives nationales de France, Minutier Central, XLII/462, inventaire après décès, André Rouquet, 13 février 1759. See also David Maskill, “The Neighbor from Hell: André Rouquet’s Eviction from the Louvre,” Journal18 2, Louvre Local, ed. Hannah Williams (Fall 2016), http://www.journal18.org/822. Doria, Louis Tocqué, 24. Archives nationales de France, Minutier Central, XLV/543, inventaire après décès, Louis Tocqué, 17 février 1772. This sum compares favorably with that of his near neighbor Chardin, whose income from annuities amounted to six thousand livres. See Georges Wildenstein, Chardin (Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1933), 27. Aved received less than half this amount as income from his annuities; see Wildenstein, Le peintre Aved. For example, the household silver owned by the Chardins was valued at less than half that amount. See Wildenstein, Chardin, 146. Only an artist such as

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Charles Coypel, First Painter to the King and Director of the Académie Royale, could match the Tocqués. At his death, his household silver was valued at over ten thousand livres. Archives nationales de France, Minutier Central, LXXVI/337, inventaire après décès, Charles-Antoine Coypel, 25 septembre 1752. Arnauld Doria, “Le comte de Saint-Florentin, son peintre et son graveur,” Bulletin de la société de l’histoire de l’art français (1932): 290–331. The use of canopied beds by individuals of Tocqué’s social group does not appear to have been unusual. Aved and the animal painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry both had such beds in their apartments. For Aved, see Wildenstein, Le peintre Aved. For Oudry, who had a lodging in the Louvre, see Colin Bailey, “‘A long working life, considerable research and much thought’: An Introduction to the Art and Career of Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686–1755),” in Oudry’s Painted Menagerie: Portraits of Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Mary Morton (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), 25. Despite its being described as “after” Nattier, the high valuation of the drawing suggests otherwise. This may well be The Fall of the Rebel Angels from 1751, now in the Louvre, which Madame Tocqué said was left to Nattier’s children; see Mémoires inédits. On the drawing, see Xavier Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier 1685–1766 (Versailles: Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, 1999), 238–41. The drawing was inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. In the list of books described in Tocqué’s inventory were fifteen volumes of English poetry including Milton. Archives nationales de France, Minutier Central, XLV/543, inventaire après décès, Louis Tocqué, 17 février 1772. On Madame Tocqué’s role in commissioning this portrait, see David Maskill, “A Proof of Cathelin’s Portrait of Louis Tocqué,” Print Quarterly 23, no. 4 (2006): 412–17. For a fascinating study of the way in which Tocqué and Nattier used portraiture to negotiate both their professional status and their personal relationship as father-in-law and son-in-law, see Hannah Williams, “Academic Intimacies: Portraits of Family, Friendship, and Rivalry at the Académie Royale,” Art History 36 (April 2013): 338–65. Archives nationales de France, Minutier Central, CXIII/447, inventaire après décès, Marie Catherine Pauline Nattier Tocqué, 10 avril 1775. The instrument features in Nattier’s portrait of himself and his family at Versailles, in which Madame Tocqué is the little girl reading the music score. The harpsichord was inherited by Madame Tocqué’s daughter, CatherinePauline. See Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 293–96. See Colin Bailey, “Marie-Jeanne Buzeau, Madame Boucher (1716–96),” The Burlington Magazine 147 (April 2005): 224–34.

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Figure 2.1. François Boucher, The Artist Inspired by Venus, c. 1760s.

chapter 2

Inventing Artifice: François Boucher’s Collection at the Louvre jessica priebe

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n the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille, a drawing by François Boucher known as The Artist Inspired by Venus (Figure 2.1) depicts a young man in his studio sketching an ethereal vision that appears before him in the form of Venus, the goddess of love. Venus is assisted by a group of winged children or putti, whose role it is to aid the goddess in her primary task of delivering inspiration to the artist. Dated to the 1760s, a period of maturity for the then sexagenarian Boucher, the Lille drawing represents a highly conceptualized form of inspiration, which acknowledges Boucher’s interest in Venus as the subject of no less than 273 works.⁄ While this interpretation will resonate with scholars of eighteenth-century art, Boucher’s contemporaries understood the Lille drawing and its companion oil sketch (lost) as an allegorical reference to the artist and his creative processes in his apartment at the Louvre, where he lived and worked from 1752 until his death in 1770.¤ As the only presumed visual reference by Boucher to his two decades at the Louvre, the Lille drawing brings into question the space of the studio and its role in facilitating artistic invention.‹ Boucher’s tenure at the Louvre was arguably the most successful period of his career, culminating with his appointment in August 1765 to premier peintre du roi and director of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. As a locus for Boucher’s creativity, the studio played an integral role in the development of his practice and in the relationships he formed with the artists, writers, collectors, and dealers who visited him there. The productivity of Boucher’s studio was 31

jessica priebe augmented through an ambitious renovation project that the artist oversaw shortly after his move to the Louvre in 1752. The details of the renovation, which were first brought to light by Alexandre Anano∑ and Daniel Wildenstein, and later examined by Colin Bailey in his article on Madame Boucher, reveal that the artist succeeded in creating a generous layout for the studio that reflected his rising status within the Académie Royale and as the favorite artist of the king’s mistress Madame de Pompadour.› In this essay, I would like to suggest that the renovation of 1752 provided Boucher with the opportunity to install a custom designed arrangement for his collection of around 13,500 di∑erent objects of fine and decorative art, curiosities, and all manner of natural history.fi Drawing on architectural plans of the studio before and after the renovation, I show how Boucher created a customized space for his collection that served his broader needs as an artist and a collector. To this end, I consider the extent to which the redevelopment of the Louvre enabled Boucher to propose new relationships between art and nature, both in the arrangement of his collection and across his painted and graphic oeuvre. The integrative nature of Boucher’s collection at the Louvre confirms the space of the studio as an extension of his artistic practice.fl Indeed, as the Lille drawing suggests, Boucher’s contemporaries understood his studio as a site for invention, a repository for objects, and a place to fantasize about visual and material things.

Trading Places: Boucher’s Move to the Louvre Long before Boucher created his bespoke apartment at the Louvre, he expressed a desire for larger accommodation. The matter was first raised in February 1746, when a petition in the form of a poem by Alexis Piron attempted to secure Boucher a place at the Louvre following the death of the sculptor Guillaume Coustou.‡ At the time, Boucher and his family were living in a modest apartment on the rue de Grenelle-SaintHonoré, an area favored by artists and dealers. Written in the guise of Boucher, Piron’s poem appealed for consideration on the grounds that Boucher had both “children” and “needs.”° By distinguishing the artist’s requirements from the duty of care he had to his family, Piron indirectly drew attention to Boucher’s rising status as an artist and a collector, the evidence for which is documented in the period records.· Despite Piron’s proposal that Boucher be given a more appropriate lodging for an artist and collector of his standing, the appeal of 1746 was denied. Two years later, Boucher took matters into his own hands. He 32

inventing artifice moved his family into what he described in a letter to dramatist CharlesSimon Favart as an “extremely small” three-floor apartment on the rue de Richelieu,⁄‚ where he remained for another four years. In June 1752, he received word that an apartment in the Louvre had become available following the death of Charles Coypel, premier peintre du roi and director of the Académie Royale.⁄⁄ Unlike the many artists who occupied logements in Louvre’s Grande Galerie, Boucher’s new apartment was located in the aile de l’Oratoire in the northwest corner of the Cour Carrée (Square Court). The first-floor apartment consisted of five rooms that were serviced by a series of domestic chambers located in the entresols (mezzanines) below. Most importantly, the apartment contained a large studio for Boucher’s busy workshop, as well as plenty of space to display his growing collection. A plan of the studio section of the apartment from 1752 (Figure 2.2) provides some insight into how Coypel had used the space. According to the plan, the studio was made up of three separate rooms. In the center was the grand atelier, which operated as a workspace for Coypel.⁄¤ On the eastern end of the studio was a large cabinet that adjoined the grand atelier through an interconnecting door. To the west was the bûcher, where Coypel stored wood to heat the apartment. Both the grand atelier and the cabinet were fitted with large windows that looked south onto the square courtyard below. By comparison, the bûcher was windowless and, for reasons of safety, lacked a fireplace. The main entrance to the studio was via the long corridor that ran along the northern side of the apartment. The corridor connected the studio on the eastern side of the apartment to two additional rooms on the western end (not shown on the plan) where Boucher and his family lived. A narrow passageway running south from the main corridor provided the only point of entry to the wood room and the winding staircase that led down to the domestic area in the first-floor entresols. Notwithstanding a claim by miniaturist Jean-Baptiste Massé that Coypel’s apartment promised to be “very comfortable” for the Boucher family, there were problems with the space.⁄‹ The most pressing issue was the lack of access to the grand atelier and cabinet, which could only be reached via the northern corridor. Similarly, the western wall that separated the grand atelier from the kitchen stairs made for a narrow passageway to the all too remote wood room. The awkward layout, combined with the apartment’s diminished domestic functionality was due to the fact that Coypel used the apartment primarily for its studio. In reality, he chose to live in the family’s much larger logement in the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, near the Imprimerie Royale.⁄› Comprised of at least fifteen rooms spread 33

Figure 2.2 Plan de la premier piece de l’attelier de Mr. Boucher au Louvre, 1752.

inventing artifice over three floors, Coypel’s logement was the primary site for his collection of around 434 paintings, drawings, and engravings, along with a number of busts, bronzes, and other decorative objects.⁄fi The logement also included a gallery on the third floor where he displayed a selection of works from the royal collection, which he oversaw in his capacity as Garde des tableaux et dessins du roi (Keeper of the paintings and drawings of the king). In recognition of his royal service, Coypel was granted use of another suite of rooms on the second floor of the Cour Carrée, which led directly from his studio via a private staircase.⁄fl In these rooms, Coypel brought together artists and academicians to discuss works from the royal collection, just as his father the painter Antoine Coypel had done before him. Given his access to three separate apartments in the Cour Carrée, Coypel’s possession of the first-floor studio can be understood as an opportunity born of dynastic privilege and rank. The same can be said of Coypel’s art collection, a large portion of which he inherited from his father and grandfather. Coypel belonged to one of two notable artist-collector dynasties operating in royal and academic circles during the eighteenth century. His closest rival in this respect was Nicolas Silvestre, who inherited a sizeable collection of drawings and engravings from his grandfather Israël Silvestre, along with his duties as drawings master of the royal pages.⁄‡ While both Nicolas Silvestre and Charles Coypel expanded their families’ collections during the first half of the eighteenth century, the dynastic nature of their respective collecting enterprises, combined with their responsibilities of o≈ce, o∑ered little room for the depth of personal expression that Boucher enjoyed in making his collection at the Louvre. Unlike Coypel and Silvestre, Boucher did not inherit a collection or a royal position. The son of a minor painter and member of the Académie de Saint Luc, Boucher’s beginnings were comparatively modest. He was the first in his family to be awarded a prestigious apartment inside the main palace, bringing with him a growing studio practice, a wife, and three children. With no evidence to suggest that Boucher was given access to the Académie’s rooms on the second floor, the artist required every available inch of the apartment to live and work in. Furthermore, he needed enough space to display his collection of art and nature, of which around half was made up of objects that could not be hung or stored flat. When inspecting the apartment for the first time in mid-1752, it must have dawned on Boucher that he would be forced to make a number of significant modifications to the studio in order to meet his needs as both an artist and a collector. 35

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Designing Spaces: Boucher’s Renovation at the Louvre Beginning in late October 1752, Boucher carried out a series of renovations at a cost of nine thousand livres, only half of which was reimbursed by the Crown during his lifetime.⁄° The results are captured in the fourth volume of Jacques-François Blondel’s Architecture Françoise (1756), which features an updated plan of the first floor of the Cour Carrée (Figure 2.3). Marked by the letter I, Boucher’s newly refurbished apartment confirms that he succeeded in creating a more generous layout that was tailored to his individual requirements. In the accompanying text, Blondel applauded Boucher’s e∑orts to modernize the apartment: “The Atelier of the late M. Coypel, premier peintre du Roi, occupied today by M. Boucher, is one in which this celebrated artist has renovated a very handsome lodging, containing an infinite amount of curiosities that merit the attention of connoisseurs.”⁄· Blondel’s comments seem to suggest that while the renovation reflected Boucher’s rising status as an artist, it was also carried out with his collection firmly in mind. In fact, it may have been Boucher’s studio that Blondel was referring to when he described the atmosphere of the otherwise notoriously dilapidated Cour Carrée as a “sanctuary of the sciences, the arts, and of taste.”¤‚ Boucher’s vision for the redevelopment of the studio included significant structural and cosmetic changes that can be understood in the context of his ambitions as an artist-collector. These modifications shed new light on the role his collection played in the advancement of his studio practices. For instance, a comparison between the 1752 and 1756 plans (Figures 2.2 and 2.3) reveals that Boucher enlarged the floor plan of the studio by removing the northern partition wall in the grand atelier. This had the advantage of opening up the space of the studio to the external corridor. He also created a new door on the eastern end of the grand atelier, circumventing the need for visitors to access the studio via the two large rooms to the west where Boucher and his family lived. To expand the space even further, he removed a section of the western wall in the grand atelier and replaced the winding geometric kitchen staircase with a more e≈cient set of straight stairs that led down to a new mezzanine floor in the entresols.¤⁄ Boucher also replaced several windows throughout the apartment.¤¤ The windows were a key component of the renovation. As Colin Bailey notes, they were so important to the artist that he o∑ered to pay for them himself.¤‹ Boucher’s decision to replace the windows may have 36

Figure 2.3 Plan au premier étage, de la distribution du Louvre, dans son état actuel, 1756.

jessica priebe been in response to his failing eyesight, a condition he claimed to have su∑ered since the mid-1740s.¤› Just by replacing the windows in the studio, he increased the amount of natural light in the grand atelier and in the cabinet. The window in the cabinet provided a spectacular backdrop for a series of glass boxes that Boucher placed in its recess.¤fi The boxes contained valuable items such as his collection of pearls, brightly colored gemstones, and a large iridescent crystal that a visitor mistook for a genuine diamond when he saw it displayed in the window.¤fl Boucher also reserved a box for his butterflies from Indonesia and China, some of which measured half a foot wide with their wings extended.¤‡ Writing about Boucher’s collection of gemstones more than a century later, art historians Edmond and Jules Goncourt argued that their “bewitching rays warmed his vision (and) his talent into life.”¤° Indeed, the dazzling brilliance and prismatic sheen cast by the objects in the window presented Boucher with a three-dimensional color palette that o∑ered him an innovative solution to his deteriorating sight. Arguably, the most significant change to the studio was the addition of a new study in the site of the former wood room.¤· As the 1756 plan (Figure 2.3) reveals, Boucher ordered a new window be built on the southern wall of the study, which is still visible from the courtyard today. He also installed a fireplace on the western side of the room, transforming the former storage area into a warm and comfortable retreat for the artist away from the daily activities of his busy studio workshop. Boucher enhanced the space further with a number of aesthetic improvements in the way of “cupboards, paneling, veneering, pieces of marble and limestone for the fireplace mantles and mirrors.”‹‚ According to the deed to Boucher’s estate, the cosmetic changes in the studio and living quarters of the apartment cost the artist 4,900 livres, a little over half of the total cost of the renovation.‹⁄ By enriching the apartment with expensive materials and artisan techniques, Boucher demonstrated his knowledge and taste as a decorator, a trade that had occupied him in his youth working on designs for the Hôtel de Soubise and at Versailles. He also drew on his experience in theater, where he created painted sets and costumes for the Paris Opéra, the OpéraComique, and in the private theaters of Madame de Pompadour at Versailles. While such projects proved financially lucrative, on a more practical level, his work as a set designer trained him in the construction of both real and illusionary space outside of the two-dimensional painted realm. In the new and much improved space of the apartment, Boucher displayed his collection of finely crafted furniture enriched with pieces 38

inventing artifice of gilt, lacquer, marble, and Boulle marquetry.‹¤ He also showcased his vast assemblage of fine art, which played an ongoing role in the development of his artistic practice. It is of little surprise that around half of his collection was made up of paintings, drawings, and engravings, from the Italian, French, and Netherlandish schools. He also acquired Chinese landscapes and still life works painted on paper, several of which had been cut out and laid onto canvas.‹‹ While Boucher’s broad selection of paintings reflects his interest in collecting as an artistic and intellectual activity, it is clear from the 1771 catalogue accompanying the sale of his collection that he had a strong preference for the French and Northern schools, in particular the seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures that were highly popular among eighteenth-century collectors.‹› Indeed, Boucher owned several significant paintings from this period, including Willem Kalf ’s Interior of a Kitchen (c. 1642–46; Paris: Musée du Louvre), Nicolaes Berchem’s A Man and a Youth Ploughing with Oxen (c. 1650–55; London: National Gallery), and Carel Fabritius’s Mercury and Argus (c. 1645–47; Los Angeles County Museum of Art).‹fi For a short time, he was in possession of Philip Wouwerman’s A Nobleman’s Sleigh on the Ice (c. 1646; Stockholm: Nationalmuseum) before he sold it to his friend and patron the comte de Tessin in 1741.‹fl Boucher also owned oil sketches by Rubens and a landscape painting by Jan van der Heyden that he purchased in Amsterdam in 1766.‹‡ Enriched with figures by Adriaen van de Velde, the painting was one of several collaborative works in the artist’s collection.‹° Boucher had long appreciated the landscapes and interiors of the Flemish and Dutch Golden Age. As his biographer Denis-Pierre-Jean Papillon de La Ferté claimed, the artist executed a number of “finished paintings in the Flemish manner” during the late 1720s, when he was living as an uno≈cial student at the French Academy in Rome.‹· Boucher’s interest in this period is also evident in later works such as the now lost Estaminet, which Pierre Rémy described in the 1769 sale catalogue of the sculptor Philippe Cayeux as being in the “spirit” and “style” of David Teniers II.›‚ Featuring a group of four men gathered inside a rustic French tavern, the composition, known only through Rémy’s description, was reminiscent of Teniers’s Peasants by an Inn Fire (c. 1640, private collection), which was in Boucher’s collection at the time of his death. Like Wouwerman, Teniers enjoyed renewed popularity during the eighteenth century largely due to the attention he received from influential French collectors Pierre Crozat and the Comtesse de Verrue.›⁄ 39

jessica priebe Noted for its “delicate handling and beautiful coloring,” Teniers’s Peasants by an Inn Fire depicts a group of men seeking comfort in the dimly lit interior of country inn.›¤ Although Boucher varied the number and activities of the men in Estaminet, his appropriation of the simple rustic charm of Teniers’s Inn is an example of how the artist looked to his collection of Netherlandish paintings, drawings, and engravings as both an exercise in connoisseurship and an endless resource of inspired models.

The grand atelier While there is no record of the order in which Boucher displayed his collection of paintings, drawings, and engravings, there is much that is known about the rest of the collection. In the absence of Boucher’s own description of his arrangement, the most detailed account comes from the memoires of the Savoyard comte, Joseph-Henri Costa de Beauregard. An aspiring artist, Beauregard visited Boucher in his studio on two occasions in February 1767, where he recalled seeing the grand atelier “decorated with many beautiful figures in terracotta, bronze and biscuit porcelain.” ›‹ This fine collection of low relief and freestanding figures included works by contemporaries Clodion, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, Louis-Félix de La Rue, Louis-Claude Vassé, and Augustin Pajou, whose life-size statue of A Cupid Eating Grapes (lost) was exhibited at the Salon of 1763 as the property of Boucher.›› According to Beauregard, Boucher filled the grand atelier with “beautifully shaped vases,” a reference to the artist’s collection of ewers, urns, and perfume burners.›fi While Boucher collected a wide range of ceramic, bronze, and marble vases from Europe, India, and Asia, his 1771 catalogue indicates that the artist had a strong preference for Asian porcelain.›fl Noted for their “singularity of form and for their beauty,” Asian porcelains were considered ideal for displaying in both large and small apartments.›‡ As the dealer Claude-François Julliot argued, the dazzling surface of Asian porcelains lent a “tone of nobility” to the contemporary French interior, while also providing relief from the comparatively subdued e∑ect of bronzes.›° Boucher enhanced his collection further with the addition of French gilt mounts. Of the 391 porcelain and earthenware objects found in Boucher’s collection, over half were mounted.›· As the 1771 catalogue confirms, Boucher owned two pairs of ancient Chinese porcelain vases, finished with a fine crackle glaze (porcelaine truitée) favored by collectors during the eighteenth century.fi‚ These monochrome vases were mounted 40

Figure 2.4. Claude-André Bouchet after François Boucher, Design for a Vase, c. 1738.

jessica priebe in a profusion of gilt laurel branches, satyrs, serpents, and rams, all after Boucher’s own design. The mounts formed part of Boucher’s wider collection of around thirty decorative objects ornamented with antique themes and motifs in a variety of mediums such as terracotta, bronze, plaster, porcelain, gilt, jade, amber, and sardonyx. Owning such objects presented Boucher with a visual index of classical motifs that he could employ across his painted and graphic oeuvre. Those motifs most often seen in Boucher’s works are putti, garlands, grotesque masks, satyrs, serpents, and the heads of lions, rams, and goats. The fact that Boucher designed the mounts in the style of the antique reveals his versatility as an artist and resourcefulness as a collector. It is also representative of his broader awareness of the trend for antique subjects taking hold in the visual arts during the second half of the eighteenth century. Boucher’s truitée vases can be traced to an earlier engraved series by the artist featuring twelve vases, each with their own inspired mounts. Published by Gabriel Huquier around 1738, Boucher’s Livre de vases sees the artist fuse classical motifs with contemporary designs for ornament. The series also highlights the connection between his drawings and his collection of mounted porcelain objects. Plate 12 (Figure 2.4), for example, depicts a design for a jasper ewer with mounts that employ the same visual motifs as the ones described on Boucher’s truitée vases. Several of these mounted vases, including that depicted in plate 12, went into production in a range of di∑erent mediums during the eighteenth century.fi⁄ It is possible that Boucher acquired the mounted truitée vases through a specialty dealer like Lazare Duvaux, from whom the artist purchased a large number of porcelain objects between 1749 and 1757.fi¤ In selecting mounted vases after his own designs, Boucher customized the display of his collectible porcelains. Moreover, he revealed his awareness of the linkages between his imagery and the market for luxury objects in mid-eighteenth-century Paris. The grand atelier was also home to Boucher’s collection of curiosities, which he displayed in a large cabinet that ran along one side of the room.fi‹ The collection included a broad range of Chinese objects including screens, parasols, an abacus, and forty-five figurines, known as pagodes, some with heads that moved and wobbled about.fi› As Jo Hedley argues, Boucher’s 1771 catalogue reads like a “prop-list” for his earlier chinoiserie designs, such as Fire (Figure 2.5), a red chalk drawing from circa 1740, and The Chinese Garden (1742; Besançon: Musée des BeauxArts), one of eight Chinese-themed tapestry cartoons designated to be woven at Beauvais under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Oudry.fifi 42

inventing artifice Boucher’s collection of Chinese objects supplied him with an endless source of themes and motifs to appropriate for his designs. Likewise, they inspired him to create an engraved series featuring his pagodes. As the title confirms, Boucher’s Recueil de diverse figures chinoises du cabinet de François Boucher peintre du roi dessinées et gravées par lui-même (1738–45) combines visual inventory with artistic invention. Comprised of twelve plates, the series depicts corresponding figures including a fashionable lady, a doctor, a musician, and a botanist (Figure 2.6). Placed in imaginary landscapes, Boucher’s figures engage in various routine activities such as taking tea, making music, and selling fish. The transformation from collected artifact to the kind of ethnographic flights of fantasy that were common to the visual language of Boucher’s chinoiseries highlights the lack of distinction between Boucher the artist and Boucher the collector. As Katie Scott notes, in summoning the word “cabinet” in the title of the Recueil, the series o∑ered unparalleled access—both real and imagined—into Boucher’s private milieu.fifl The fact that the publisher Huquier used the title to insist that these collectibles were “drawn” and “engraved” by Boucher further adds to the imaginative potential of Boucher’s collection and his artistic processes in the studio. Other objects displayed in the grand atelier had a long history in Boucher’s artistic practice. For instance, the wall cabinet housed a range of miniature models and mechanical toys, including a sailing ship, a fishing boat, a canon, and several wooden nets used for catching birds.fi‡ The nets may have served as inspiration for his suite of avian imagery, most notably The Bird Trap, a drawing engraved by Pierre Aveline in 1738 (Cambridge: Harvard Art Museum).fi° The cabinet also contained a miniature carriage with upholstered seats, a plough, a rake, a wheelbarrow, and equipment from a toy farmhouse.fi· As emblems of agrarian industry, these objects played an important role in the development of Boucher’s landscape and pastoral subjects, such as the chariot that delivers the children in Giles Demarteau’s engraving after Boucher’s design for Le Petit Chariot (c. 1737; Paris: Musée du Louvre), or more broadly as part of the mise en scène of Boucher’s Landscape with a Watermill (1755; London: National Gallery), painted three years after his move to the Louvre. The relationship between the display of objects in the grand atelier and his artistic practice suggests that his collection served two important purposes. Part decoration and part inspiration, it was a visual reminder of Boucher’s impeccable taste for selecting luxury and material items that traversed the boundaries between the real and pictorial realms. 43

Figure 2.5. François Boucher, Fire, c. 1740.

Figure 2.6. François Boucher, Chinese Botanist, 1738–45.

jessica priebe For Boucher, nets, vases, and pagodes existed as collectibles displayed simultaneously in the grand atelier and in the space of the artist’s imagination, which found expression in his designs both before and after his transition to the Louvre. In referencing these objects in his paintings and drawings, however obliquely, Boucher found a way to explore ideas relating to inspiration, emulation, collecting, and the studio as the site of production and a repository for material things. For Rémy, the link between collected object and artistic inspiration was one of intent, driven by the artist’s passion for seeking out things that appealed to his desires.fl‚ This extended to the choice of workbenches, easels, brushes, and porphyry grinders that Boucher kept in the grand atelier. Listed in Rémy’s 1771 catalogue under the heading “Ustensiles de Peintre,” a number of these items blurred the line between collected object and artistic instrument. For instance, Rémy admired Boucher’s ivory-handled mahlstick and a camera obscura, which were both in excellent condition.fl⁄ He also singled out an ornate wooden cabinet that Boucher used to store his paints.fl¤ The paint cabinet enjoyed renewed status as a collector’s item when it was sold in 1771 to Boucher’s patron, the financier and collector Pierre Jacques Onésime Bergeret de Grancourt.fl‹ The object may have had sentimental value for Bergeret, as it was from this same paint box that Boucher created the presumed portrait of his second wife (1766; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art). With its marble top and eleven elegantly crafted drawers, the cabinet was both a utilitarian object and an example of fine craftsmanship. Moreover, as a source of Boucher’s creativity, the cabinet was emblematic of the fluidity between the artist’s taste for collecting certain objects and the production of work at the Louvre during these years.

The Natural History Cabinet The close relationship between taste and productivity in Boucher’s grand atelier was also apparent in the adjoining cabinet. Located on the eastern end of the apartment, the cabinet contained over five thousand natural objects, along with a selection of objets d’art chosen by Boucher to enhance the decorative potential of the display. According to the playwright Antoine Bret de Dijon, the artist “spent his final years perfecting his cabinet of natural history. . . . His rich collection o∑ered the eyes of collectors only the most rare and perfectly chosen pieces from every genre.”fl› Boucher’s cabinet was both a place of retreat for the artist and 46

inventing artifice a destination for like-minded collectors. This is confirmed by the painter Johann Christian von Mannlich, who visited Boucher at the Louvre in 1764. Accompanied by his patron Christian IV, the duke of Zweibrücken, Mannlich recalled finding “the painter of the French graces in his cabinet of natural history,” the arrangement of which he described as “unique.”flfi According to Mannlich, the trio remained in the cabinet, where they discussed mineralogy for some time.flfl The visit concluded with the duke agreeing to send Boucher a case of quicksilver minerals from his native Deuxponts in appreciation for accepting Mannlich as his student.fl‡ The ability for Boucher’s natural history cabinet to function as a site of sociability and discursive learning was a key component of the artist’s vision for the redevelopment of the studio. As the 1756 plan (Figure 2.3) shows, Boucher installed a new door that led directly from the cabinet to the external corridor. Prior to this, access to the space was restricted to the internal door that connected the cabinet to the grand atelier. The new door was located on the northern wall of the cabinet, next to the new entrance to the studio. By creating an external entrance, Boucher legitimized the cabinet as an independent destination. Boucher’s reputation as a convivial host and tour guide to the cabinet was central to its success. As Rémy pointed out, “the only thing more seductive” than Boucher’s cabinet, was the “honnêteté, inherent politeness, a∑ability, fine wit, and cheerfulness of its owner.”fl° Those lucky enough to receive an invitation to view the cabinet were treated to a spectacular display of art and nature. Beauregard, for example, proclaimed it to be “the most wonderful thing . . . where everything is arranged with great art and taste.”fl· Similarly, the Polish aristocrat Michel Mniszech described the cabinet as “an immense storehouse of curiosities from art and nature, uniquely arranged for the pleasure of the eye.”‡‚ Part decorative and part abstract taxonomy, Boucher’s arrangement was at once a tasteful spectacle and an attempt at displaying genuine scientific instruction. For the most part, the arrangement of objects in the cabinet followed the principles set out in Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville’s La Conchyliologie (1742). Boucher was familiar with Dezallier’s guide to the study and collection of natural history. He designed the frontispiece for the 1742 edition, which was reused for subsequent editions in 1757 and 1780. In line with Dezallier’s recommendations, Boucher installed a series of large wall cupboards with glass-fronted panels that allowed his collection to be viewed easily.‡⁄ According to Beauregard and Rémy, the cupboards were filled with the finest minerals and corals, along with 47

Figure 2.7. Augustin de Saint-Aubin, after Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Frontispiece to a Sales Catalogue, 1757.

inventing artifice pieces of gold, silver, lead, iron, and tin sourced from mines in Norway, Hungary, Germany, and France.‡¤ The arrangement of objects in the wall cabinets conformed to Dezallier’s formal criterion for classifying objects by size, shape, and where possible, geographical origin. However, Boucher also experimented with grouping di∑erent colored objects in order to test their aesthetic relationship.‡‹ For example, he brought together three di∑erent types of polyped red fire coral (milliepores) with smaller spongy stems of purple fungi (faux corail violet ), grown on the forest floor.‡› Boucher used this same purple fungi with di∑erent colored examples of its kind to create a spectacular bouquet that was reminiscent of his own highly charged palette.‡fi As Bret de Dijon noted, such artifice gave Boucher’s natural history cabinet “a charming look,” which he argued could only be “the work of a soul sensitive to the harmony of colors.”‡fl Boucher’s ability to think aesthetically about nature can be understood as part of the wider decorative aims of the cabinet. For example, in the intervals between wall cupboards, Boucher hung his collection of ceremonial arms and instruments from China, India, and Turkey.‡‡ Next to the internal door that led back to the grand atelier, he placed an antique white marble bust on an ornate porphyry pedestal, one of several busts Dezallier recommended for display.‡° On the other side of the internal door, Boucher installed a cupboard filled with large shells, which Beauregard singled out for their “surprising delicacy.”‡· Additional vases carved from porphyry were placed on pedestals and display tables around the room.°‚ The vases belonged to a larger collection of hard stone vessels in the cabinet made from a variety of mediums including jade, amber, rock crystal, and aventurine.°⁄ Chosen for their material connection to nature, they highlighted the artist’s taste for collecting objects that playfully engaged with the relationship between art and nature. In the center of the room, Boucher installed a long table topped with a glass inlay. Reports of the table suggest that it was similar in design to the one pictured in Gabriel Saint-Aubin’s frontispiece design (Figure 2.7) for the estate sales of the marquis de Bonnac (1757) and Dezallier d’Argenville (1766). In the shallow drawers below the glass, Boucher displayed his collection of smaller shells, minerals, and butterflies.°¤ On top of the long table, Boucher created a spectacular centerpiece consisting of a number of specially chosen shells placed around a large red bird from the Indian subcontinent.°‹ The arrangement indicates that Boucher’s scientific concerns in the cabinet were not strictly pedagogical; 49

jessica priebe they were also focused on inciting tensions in the relationship between art and nature through his own carefully constructed artistic display. In addition to bringing together di∑erent groups of natural objects in the cabinet, Boucher experimented with various artistic devices such as mirrors, porcelain, and gilding in order to present a more artful vision of nature. For example, Boucher placed on a gilded pedestal a glass box containing a group of small birds resting on a bouquet of artificial flowers.°› The combination of the delicate birds with the artificial e∑ect of nature generated by the flowers embodied the acute tensions between art and nature taking hold in Boucher’s cabinet during these years. Boucher’s concern with the artful e∑ects of nature was also evident in his presentation of sixteen di∑erent shell tables covered with mirrors.°fi Writing about Boucher’s mirrored shell tables in Conchyliologie nouvelle et portative (1767), Dezallier d’Argenville claimed that “this ingenious painter” had succeeded in creating “enameled parterre capable of rivaling nature.”°fl Such stylized arrangements were seen as unique to Boucher. As Rémy argued, visitors to the artist’s cabinet would “recognise the picturesque style and graces of M. Boucher, a taste that few people can claim.”°‡ Indeed, just as individual objects in Boucher’s collection served as inspiration in his wider artistic practice, his experience as a decorator and painter led him to create arrangements that exhibited the distinct mark of the artist. Boucher’s artistic agency over his collection can be better understood through his engagement with the renovated space of the studio. As Mannlich recalled, Boucher worked across each of three rooms in the studio, his collection forming an integral part of his artistic process: “In the morning he took his chocolate in his cabinet (of natural history), amusing himself, or retouching a design. . . . After this, he positioned himself in front of his easel in his study, where he painted the smallest accessories found in nature: something neither I, nor my friend Ménageot, nor any other collector however enlightened would have known had we not seen it everyday.”°° In customizing the space of the studio, Boucher found a way to assimilate his interests as an artist and a collector. Moreover, his collection inspired him to propose new relationships between art and nature in his artistic practice, even if, as Mannlich warned, objects were rendered unrecognizable to his audience. Such layers of artifice relate to Boucher’s treatment of shells. For example, in Triumph of Venus, from 1740 (Figure 2.8), shells are twisted, bent, and macerated to create new shapes that test the boundaries of form and function. In Boucher’s hands, shells like the Concha veneris (one of more 50

Figure 2.8. François Boucher, Triumph of Venus, 1740.

jessica priebe than 150 clamshells in his collection) take on more playful and exaggerated forms as part of the highly decorous chariot that delivers Venus to her mythological birthplace of Cythera, and as the jewelry dish on the right, whose nacreous surface reflects the pink and grey fabric above.°· By choosing to highlight the purely aesthetic qualities of shells at the expense of their potentially less appealing natural properties, Boucher blurred the line between the artful and the natural. In Triumph of Venus, for instance, Boucher’s Concha veneris becomes, in e∑ect, a self-conscious re-presentation of its natural counterpart. Reordering nature in this way o∑ered Boucher an opportunity to improve existing shapes in nature and, in some cases, to invent entirely new forms of representation, such as the shell-sled that appears in Winter (1755; New York: Frick Collection). Scholars of eighteenth-century art have long been aware of Boucher’s renovation at the Louvre. However, until recently, very little of their discussion has focused on the role of his collection in the construction and decoration of the space.·‚ The installation of the collection at the Louvre reveals Boucher’s facility for artistic and scientific display and suggests an acute awareness to the built environment around him. On any given day, Boucher’s studio operated as a workshop, an o≈ce, a school, and a gallery for prospective clients. It also functioned as a repository for objects and place for like-minded individuals to come and admire his collection. The integrative and at times mobile nature of the collection shows how its objects were easily co-opted into the process of art making. In this way, the studio and its contents became an extension of Boucher’s artistic practice. Although the renovation served Boucher as an artist and a collector, it also adhered to his larger aesthetic project of creating a material fantasy of luxury objects that soothed his soul and fired his imagination. In thinking about Boucher’s engagement with his studio at the Louvre, it is possible to interpret the Lille drawing (Figure 2.1) as a love letter to art making.·⁄ The powers of seduction that the young artist imagined through the body of Venus become an encoded sign for Boucher’s creativity in the studio, the primary site for his artistic invention and the home to his treasured collection. Looking at the page of the artist’s sketchbook reveals nothing of the vision before him. Instead, Venus represents a higher ideal of creativity in which the artist’s imagination is key. To this end, the Lille drawing and its companion oil sketch are works of art that explore the nature of artistic inspiration as their subject, while at the same time enduring as products of Boucher’s inspired processes formed in his studio at the Louvre. 52

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The author would like to thank Nicola Parsons, Jennifer Milam, and Julia Oestreich for their comments on this essay. Quantitative analysis of artists’ frequency depicting Venus since the Middle Ages ranks Boucher first in the top ten European artists representing the goddess. See K. Bender, The French Venus (2009), http://sites.google.com/site /venusiconography/. On the subject of Venus as muse, see Melissa Hyde, “Getting into the Picture,” in Rethinking Boucher, ed. Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 21–23. This interpretation orginated with Gaspard de Sireul (1720–1781), owner of the Lille drawing and its companion oil sketch. See Pierre Rémy, Catalogue d’une riche collection . . . qui composent le cabinet de M.***[Vassal de SaintHubert] (Paris, 1779), lot 112; and N.-F.-Jacques Boileau, Catalogue des tableaux et dessins précieux qui composent le cabinet de M. de Sireul (Paris, 1781), lot 30. Boucher employs a similar composition in Pygmalion and Galatea, a brown chalk study for his 1767 mythological painting of the same name (Saint Petersburg: Hermitage Museum). For analysis of this sketch in the context of Boucher’s pictures of the artist at work, see Jessica Priebe, François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2021), 204-14. Alexandre Anano∑ in collaboration with Daniel Wildenstein, François Boucher (Lausanne: La Bibliothèque des arts, 1976), 1:29; and Colin B. Bailey, “MarieJeanne Buzeau, Madame Boucher (1716–96),” The Burlington Magazine 147, no. 1225 (2005): 224–34. Boucher’s collection was auctioned o∑ over the course of several weeks in the artist’s studio at the Louvre in February 1771. The sale catalogue provides a detailed list of the objects in his possession at the time of his death in May 1770. See Pierre Rémy, Catalogue raisonné des Tableaux, Desseins, Estampes, Bronzes, Terres cuites, Laques, Porcelaines de différentes sortes, montées & non montées; Meubles curieux, Bijoux, Minéraux, Cristallisations, Madrepores, Coquilles & autres Curiosités qui composent le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, premier peintre du Roi (Paris: Musier, 1771). I am drawing on Svetlana Alpers’s reading of the studio as an apparatus for art making. Svetlana Alpers, “The View from the Studio,” The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 126–49. As cited in Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:29 (doc. 255). “J’ay des enfants et des besoins.” As cited in ibid. According to his friend J. G. Wille, Boucher began collecting in the 1730s, purchasing objects from dealers such as Edme-François Gersaint. During the 1740s, he attended the estate sales of Pierre Crozat (1741) and Antoine de La Roque (1745), where he bid on art, decorative objects, shells, and clothing. This period also saw a rise in artistic commissions, most notably the 1,600 livres he received from the comte de Tessin in 1740 for The Triumph of Venus (Figure 2.8) and in 1744, 5,000 livres to design sets and costumes for the Paris Opéra. See J. G. Wille, Mémoires et Journal (Paris: Renouard, 1857), 1:470; and Priebe, Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France, 48, 122–24, 146.

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jessica priebe 010 As cited in Alastair Laing, “Trois lettres de François Boucher et de sa femme à l’auteur dramatique Favart,” Archives de l’art français 29 (1988): 21. 011 Jules Gui∑rey, “Logements d’artistes au Louvre,” in Nouvelles archives de l’art français 2 (1873): 92. 012 On Coypel at the Louvre, see Esther Bell, “A Curator at the Louvre: Charles Coypel and the Royal Collections,” in “Louvre Local,” ed. Hannah Williams, special issue Journal18 2 (Fall 2016), http://www.journal18.org/986; and Katie Scott, “Parade’s End: On Charles-Antoine Coypel’s Bed and the Origins of Inwardness,” in Interiors and Interiority, ed. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beate Söntgen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 17–47. 013 “très commodement.” Cited in Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:54. 014 On Coypel’s residence, see Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 134–36; and Scott, “Parade’s End," 17–47. 015 Pierre-Jean Mariette, Catalogue des tableaux, dessins, marbres, bronzes . . . du cabinet de feu M. Coypel (Paris, 1753). 016 Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Antoine Coypel, 1661–1722 (Paris: Arthéna, 1989), 253–54; and Bell, “A Curator at the Louvre.” 017 See Dena Goodman and Emily Talbot, “Documenting Art, Writing Biography: Construction of the Silvestre Family History, 1660–1868,” Journal of Family History 40, no. 3 (2015): 277–304. 018 An estimate for the renovation together with a current plan of the apartment was submitted to the Crown on October 16, 1752. Cited in Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:56–57 (docs. 507–8). 019 “Atelier de feu M. Coypel, premier peintre du Roi, occupé aujourd’hui par M. Boucher & dans lequel ce célèbre artiste s’est pratiqué un fort beau logement, contenant une infinité de curiosités qui méritent l’attention des connoisseurs,” Jacques-François Blondel, Architecture Françoise (Paris: Jombert, 1756), 4:36 (plate 6). 020 “sanctuaire des sciences, des arts et du goût.” Ibid., 4:39. 021 These changes are confirmed in the estimate. See Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:56 (doc. 507). 022 Ibid. 023 Bailey, “Madame Boucher,” 226. 024 On the issue of Boucher’s eyesight, see Carl Fredrik Sche∑er, Lettres particulieres à Carl Gustaf Tessin, 1744–1752, ed. Jan Heidner (Stockholm: Kungl. Samfundet for utgivande av handskrifter rorande Skandinaviens historia, 1982), 104. 025 The location and contents of the boxes are discussed in Joseph-Henri Costa de Beauregard, Journal de voyage d’un jeune noble savoyard à Paris en 1766–1767, ed. Patrick Michel (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Univ. Septentrion, 2013), 99. 026 Ibid; and Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 1448, 1791. 027 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 94-95, 99. 028 Edmond and Jules Goncourt, French Eighteenth-Century Painters (Oxford: Phaidon, 1981), 89. 029 On the existence of Boucher’s study (cabinet d’étude), see Johann Christian von

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030

031 032

033 034

035 036 037

038 039 040 041 042 043 044

Mannlich, Histoire de ma vie: Mémoires de Johann Christian von Mannlich (1741–1822), ed. Karl-Heinz Bender and Herman Kleber (Trier: Spee-Verlag, 1989), 1:157. “les boiseries en armoires, lambris, plaquages, portes et fenetres, cheminées de marbre et de pierre de liair, glaces et autres ajustements et ornements.” Liquidation et partage (April 6, 1773). Archives Nationales France, see AN MCXXXV 775, 7. Ibid. Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 997–1037. Boulle marquetry is a distinctive form of woodwork developed by the French cabinetmaker André Charles Boulle. It involves inlaying thin pieces of precious materials, such as pewter and tortoiseshell, to create intricate patterns on the surface of the furniture. Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 517–24. On Boucher’s interest in the Northern school, see Françoise Joulie, ed., Boucher et les peintre du Nord (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2004); and Françoise Joulie, “La collection de François Boucher,” in L’Artiste collectionneur de dessin, ed. C. Monbeig Goguel (Paris: Société du Salon du Dessin, 2006), 129–40. Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 12, 21, 18. Görel Cavalli-Björkman, Dutch and Flemish Paintings (Sweden: Nationalmuseum, 1986), 2:536. Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 14, 16, 1826. On Boucher’s purchase of the landscape, see Alexandre Joseph Paillet, Catalogue d’une riche collection de tableaux des plus grands maîtres des trois écoles . . . tout provenant du célébre cabinet du citoyen Robit (Paris, 1801), lot 48. Boucher’s ownership of the oil sketches is discussed in Marjorie E. Wieseman, “Pursuing and Possessing Passion: Two Hundred Years of Collecting Rubens’s Oil Sketches,” in Drawn by the Brush: Oil Sketches by Peter Paul Rubens, ed. Peter C. Sutton, Marjorie E. Wieseman, and Nico Van Hout (Greenwich, CT: Yale University Press in association with Bruce Museum of Arts and Sciences, 2004), 55. On Boucher’s ownership of these works, see Priebe, Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France, 101-2, 130-31. “à la maniere des Flamands.” D.-P.-J. Papillon de La Ferté, Extrait des di∑érens ouvrages publiés sur la vie des peintres, (Paris: Ruault, 1776), 2:657. Pierre Rémy, Catalogue raisonné des tableaux . . . le cabinet de feu M. Cayeux (Paris, 1769), lot 50. Ziskin, Sheltering Art, 77, and appendices 1 and 2. “d’une touché précieuse et d’un beau coloris.” Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lot 9. “L’attelier est orné de plusieurs belles figures en terre cuite en bronze et en biscuit.” Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 99–100. Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 140–51, 155, 618–41, 1851–52; and Explication des peintures, sculptures, et gravures de Messieurs de l’Académie royale. . . . dans le grand Salon du Louvre, pour l’année 1763 (Paris, 1763), 35, cat. 172. On Boucher’s repeated loans to the Salon, see Priebe, Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France, 89–92, 98–100.

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jessica priebe 045 “vases d’une très belle forme.” Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 100. 046 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 745–832. 047 “par la singularité des formes, que par la beauté.” P. Rémy and C.-F. Julliot, Catalogue raisonné . . . de M. de Julienne (Paris, 1767), 2:5. On the significance of Asian porcelains, see Kristel Smentek, Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (New York: Frick Collection, 2007), 10–20. 048 “Elles ornent, avec un ton de noblesse.” Rémy and Julliot, Catalogue raisonné. . . . de M. de Jullienne, 2:5. 049 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 811–19. 050 For examples of Boucher’s own mounts, see ibid., lots 817, 819. 051 See Alicia Priore, “François Boucher’s Designs for Vases and Mounts,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 3 (1996): 25–31. 052 Louis Courajod, Le Livre-Journal de Lazare Duvaux, vol. 2 (Paris, 1873), nos. 140, 575, 903, 910, 965, 988, 1047, 1081, 1092, 1229, 2490, 2559, 2774. 053 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 100. 054 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, 946–47, 974. For the pagodes, see lots 659–83, 697, 750–52, 767, 776. 055 Jo Hedley, François Boucher: Seductive Vısions (London: The Wallace Collection, 2004), 76. 056 Katie Scott, “Reputation and Reputation: ‘François Boucher’ and the Formation of Artistic Indentities,” in Rethinking Boucher, ed. Melissa Hyde and Mark Ledbury (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 105. 057 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 100. 058 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 1068, 1072, 1070, 976. 059 Ibid., lots 1071–72. 060 Ibid., Preface, n.p. 061 Ibid., lot 1007. 062 Ibid., lots 1079, 1082. 063 The paint cabinet in discussed in Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 79. This important study examines Boucher’s activities as a consumer of luxury to better understand his modernity. 064 “Il avait employé les derniers années de sa vie à se faire un Cabinet d’Histoire naturelle. . . . Sa riche collection o∑rira aux yeux des Curieux ce que ce genre peut avoir de rare, & sur-tout ce qu’il peut réunir de plus parfait dans chaque espece.” Cited in Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:137. 065 Mannlich, Histoire de ma vie, 1:56. 066 Ibid. 067 On the nature of this exchange and the role the gift economy played in the formation of Boucher’s natural history collection, see Jessica Priebe, “The Artist as Collector: François Boucher (1703–1770),” Journal of the History of Collections 28, no. 1 (2016): 27–42, 10–12. 068 “mais ce qui séduisoit toujours le plus, étoient l’honnêteté, la politesse naturelle, l’a∑abilité, la finesse d’esprit & la gaieté du propiétaire.” Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, Preface, n.p.

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inventing artifice 069 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 94–95. 070 “est un immense magasin de curiosités de l’art et la nature, rangés uniquement pour le coup d’oeil.” Michel Mniszech, “Un gentilhomme polonais à Paris en 1767,” Revue Rétrospective 6 (1887): 109. 071 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, L’Histoire naturelle éclaircie dans deux de ses parties principales, la Lithologie et la Conchyliologie (Paris: De Bure, 1742), 192–97. Hereafter referred to as La Conchyliologie. 072 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 99; and Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 1116–1226. 073 Dezallier d’Argenville, La Conchyliologie, 192–97. 074 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lot 1569. 075 Ibid., lot 1581. 076 “l’ouvrage que d’une ame sensible à l’harmonie des couleurs.” Cited in Anano∑ and Wildenstein, François Boucher, 1:137. 077 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 100. 078 Ibid; and Dezallier d’Argenville, La Conchyliologie, 192. 079 “délicatesse étonnante.” Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 100. 080 Ibid. 081 Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lots 902–942. 082 Beauregard, Journal de voyage, 99. 083 Ibid. 084 Ibid., 100. 085 The shell tables are listed in Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, lot 1021. 086 “un parterre émaillé qui semble le disputer à la nature.” Dezallier d’Argenville, Conchyliologie nouvelle et portative (Paris: Regnard, 1767), 312–13. 087 “l’on reconnoissoit le goût pittoresque & plein de graces de M. Boucher, goût auquel peu de gens peuvent pretender.” Rémy, Catalogue raisonné . . . le cabinet de feu M. Boucher, Preface, n.p. 088 “Le matin, tout en prenant du chocolat dans son cabinet, il s’amusait à faire ou à retoucher un dessin. . . . Apres celà il se mit devant son chévalet dans son cabinet d’étude, ou il peignoit jusqu’aux moindres accessoires d’apres la nature: ce que, certainement ni moi, ni mon ami Ménageot ni aucun amateur tant soit peu éclaireé ne pouvoit déviner si nous ne l’avions vu tous les jours.” Mannlich, Histoire de ma vie, 1:157. 089 On the link between Boucher’s shells and his marine paintings, see Jamie Mulherron, “François Boucher and the Art of Conchology,” The Burlington Magazine CLVIII (April 2016): 254–63. 090 See Priebe, Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France, 161–66, 176–96; and Lajer-Burcharth, The Painter’s Touch, 73–80. 091 My analysis is indebted to Melissa Hyde, who was the first to suggest that Boucher’s lifelong pursuit of representing Venus can be understood as an expression of painterly love. See Hyde, “Getting into the Picture,” 21–23.

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Figure 3.1. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, The Vırgin and Child, c. 1755.

chapter 3

Continental Porcelain Made in England: The Case of the Chelsea Porcelain Factory matthew martin

T

here exists a complex interplay between nationalist and cosmopolitan tendencies in British art and art writing from the eighteenth century onward. William Hogarth most famously presented himself as anti-French and proudly English; yet, as Robin Simon has recently shown, it was Hogarth’s detailed knowledge of French art that enabled him to create a distinctive type of art, which could be claimed as “British.”⁄ Mark Cheetham has noted a similar tension in Hogarth’s aesthetic writings and brought new attention to the centrality to art writing in England over the last three hundred years of the question: “What is the English tradition?”¤ What has not been explored in relation to these tensions is the production and reception in England of religious art connected to the CounterReformation that was simultaneously claimed as “British” and linked to Catholicism, in particular French Catholicism, on the Continent. The very existence of such art seems to fly in the face of the contention of historians like Linda Colley that, post-1710 and the Act of Union, it was a common commitment to Protestantism and continuing antagonism toward Catholic France that formed the foundations of a developing “British” identity in the eighteenth century.‹ This essay considers a small group of porcelain sculptures employing Counter-Reformation devotional imagery produced by the London Chelsea factory in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. These objects have the potential to cast light on the relationship between the 59

matthew martin forces of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in the world of eighteenthcentury British art. Although discussions of the “Britishness” of art in England in this period have been largely restricted to the field of painting, European porcelain represented a highly symbolically charged art form that played an important representative role in contemporary aristocratic culture.› Porcelain sculpture is worthy of investigation as an autonomous artistic expression capable of bearing rhetorical content. The context of the production of these English sculptures provides us with a glimpse of the international character of the eighteenthcentury European porcelain industry. Porcelain artists and craftsmen were frequently highly mobile, moving from factory to factory and country to country, often many times, in the course of their working life. The Chelsea factory epitomized this phenomenon; the majority of figures associated with the factory about whom we possess any biographical information were of non-British origin. Yet this factory sought to position itself in the British market as an English competitor to the German Meissen and French Vincennes-Sèvres factories, which dominated mid-century European luxury porcelain production. The porcelain sculptures considered here, in addition to providing general insight into the cosmopolitan character of the English porcelain industry, also provide an opportunity to examine a very specific scenario of luxury consumption. The small group of works I am concerned with—porcelain images of the Pietà and the Vırgin and Child—appear to have been specifically intended as devotional images and were most likely acquired by English Roman Catholic patrons. Focus on these works provides rare insight into the often-overlooked phenomenon of recusant art patronage and collecting in eighteenthcentury England. Denied a role in the political life of the country, many members of the recusant elite remained fully engaged in the social world of their day and sought to accumulate status through patronage and collection, but did so in a fashion that reflected a distinctive English Catholic identity. Acquiring grand works in porcelain was an activity indulged in by wealthy members of the eighteenth-century English elite, and by acquiring a devotional image in Chelsea porcelain, a Catholic aristocrat simultaneously reflected membership in a European aristocratic Catholic culture and, through the object’s status as an English luxury product, membership in the English elite. Such an object thus expressed a uniquely English Catholic identity, at once nationalist and 60

continental porcelain made in england cosmopolitan. In addition, by positioning such sculptures in the context of the overall production of the Chelsea factory more generally, it can be seen that Chelsea’s output carefully balanced regard for the English aristocracy’s admiration for French cultural achievements with a commercially motivated appeal to a more popular image of France, propounded by the likes of Hogarth.fi The Chelsea factory shows that non-British, Francophone artists produced works that were frequently French in character and content, but marketed as British to a British audience. As the leading eighteenth-century English luxury porcelain manufacturer, the Chelsea factory was the first English undertaking to produce porcelain of the soft-paste type on a commercial scale. Unlike the slightly later Bow and Worcester factories, from the outset the Chelsea factory aimed its wares at a wealthy, aristocratic clientele.fl Established in 1744 in a house and premises on Church Lane East,‡ the Chelsea factory was, as John Mallett has suggested, essentially a Franco-Flemish concern operating in London.° In an important document from around 1759 that survived in the Sèvres archives, the Swissborn industrial spy Jacques Louis Brolliet made comment on the Chelsea factory, stating that It [the Chelsea factory] was first established by Mr Gouin, brother of a Paris Jeweller of that name, born at Dieppe of the so-called Reformed Faith [lit: la R.P.R.]. · His paste was compounded by d’ Ostermann , a German, chemist and artist of Dr Ward, a famous empiric. Mr Gouin left, with the loss of part of his funds, and makes at his house in St James’s Street, very beautiful small porcelain figures. The present undertaker of the Chilsea [sic ] factory is one named Sprémont [Nicholas Sprimont], from Liège. His turner was a Frenchman named Martin. He left Chelsea and went to Lambeth, to work for Jacson, a faience-maker. The modeller is one named Flanchet, a pupil of Mr Duplessis. The Draughtsman is named Du Vivier: he is Flemish.⁄‚

An artist not mentioned in Brolliet’s report, but of interest here, is Joseph Willems, the Brussels-born sculptor largely responsible for the factory’s figure production through the 1750s, much of it in a Flemish late Baroque idiom.⁄⁄ This document presents the senior sta∑ of the Chelsea factory as being exclusively of foreign origin. In this regard, we may note comments by a correspondent described as “One of great Justness of Thought” in the Public Advertiser for June 14, 1753: 61

matthew martin The Manufacture of Porcelain improves but slowly, either for want of Skill, Stocks, or Spirit in the Undertakers: this is a Commodity of great Demand, draws large Sums yearly out of the Kingdom, and is paid for wholly in ready Money. We want none of the Materials; and yet Bruges, Dresden and Paris, without any natural Advantages superior to England, have far outstripped us, though the Art has been long in many hands here. From the last mentioned Places we must invite our Workmen, if we expect ever to see this fine Manufacture at any Height amongst us, for this is the shortest Method of gaining a new Art in all cases. As foreign China is an Import which a∑ects none of our native Commodities, either in their Fabric or Vent, I can see no Inconvenience to the Public from raising its Price, by higher Duty, nearer to that at which our own can be a∑orded. If this was done . . . I believe we should soon be able to supply our own Demands, without applying to Holland or the Indies. At present the Manufacturers are solely enabled to pursue the Art, through the Public Spirit and Generosity of those who think no Price too great for English Ingenuity.⁄¤

This passage is of interest on a number of grounds. It suggests that, in 1753, English porcelain in general was a high-priced commodity accessible only to those of means.⁄‹ It also suggests that there existed the perception that English porcelain was unable to compete with foreign imports in quality or price, but that despite these failings, there were those who supported the English porcelain industry and its products because they were English. Somewhat ironically, then, the writer of this passage also proposes that the importation of skilled foreign artists was a means by which to improve the standard of the English porcelain industry’s production. This is certainly what we observe at the Chelsea factory in the 1750s, where the proprietor and much of his sta∑, including the leading artists, hailed from, and received artistic training in, the wider French-speaking world. But although the Chelsea factory was conducted by predominantly non-English personnel, the factory appears to have negotiated for itself a specifically English market identity. As with other English porcelain manufacturers, much of the factory’s production was heavily imitative of porcelain produced both in Asia and at the great Continental court manufactories of Meissen and, during the late 1750s and 1760s, Vincennes-Sèvres.⁄› Chelsea’s market, however, was almost exclusively British. Apart from the category of porcelain toys—small seals, snu∑ boxes, scent bottles, etuis, cutlery handles—for which there seems to have been a modest export trade to the Continent, there is very little evidence that Chelsea porcelain, or any 62

continental porcelain made in england other English porcelain for that matter, was ever able successfully to find a Continental market.⁄fi Although there were concerns expressed about the quality of English porcelain when compared to the imported competition, the contemporary advertising of Chelsea’s products was often framed in terms of its equal quality, or even superiority, to German, French, and Asian imports. So in the Daily Advertiser for March 5, 1745, the earliest newspaper notice we have of the Chelsea factory states: “We hear that the China made at Chelsea is arriv’d to such Perfection, as to equal if not surpass the finest old Japan, allow’d so by the most approv’d Judges here; and that the same is in so high Esteem of the Nobility, and the Demand so great, that a su≈cient Quantity can hardly be made to answer the Call for it.”⁄fl An advertisement placed on April 14 and 17, 1755, in the same journal by the ironmonger Mr. Hughes, a frequent dealer in Chelsea porcelain, speaks of a large group of porcelain flowers o∑ered for sale at his premises in Pall Mall. He states: “The Flowers are all copied from Nature, and are the finest that ever were exhibited to Sale. St. Vincent in France, Dresden, or any other Country in the World, cannot excel them (as well as several other Pieces of the Chelsea China) in Beauty, Goodness, or Cheapness.”⁄‡ Again in the Public Advertiser for May 17, 18, 20 and 21, 1756, the following appeared: Mr. Turner will expose to Sale, at his Shop on the Terras, in St. James’s-street, several hundred Sorts of Figures, Birds, and Animals, for Desarts, or Ornament, with new Patterns of Candlesticks, ornamented with all sorts of Flowers; likewise Clock Cases, Watch Cases, Gerandoles, Brackets, and Epargnes, from Three Guineas to one Hundred and Seventy, the greatest variety of Tea and Co∑ee Equipages, enamelled, in Birds, Flowers and Insects, of the curious Chelsea China, which exceed Dresden, and is equal to that of Vincent, with all Sorts of Baskets, Leaves, and every Thing that is used in Desarts.⁄°

This extract provides an indication of the relative esteem in which the products of the Meissen and Vincennes factories were held by an English audience in the mid-1750s. Although the sacking of the Meissen factory in 1756 categorically ended its dominance of the European porcelain market, it is clear that the Vincennes manufactory had already begun to challenge the standing of Meissen in the English market. The outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in August of 1756 must, of course, have been of great benefit to Chelsea as direct trade with the Continent was greatly reduced; its wares would have, by default, assumed a position of dominance in the English luxury porcelain 63

matthew martin market. Its designs in this period, however, remained largely imitative of French taste, clearly reflecting London market expectations. So, for example, a potpourri vase first produced at Chelsea during the late 1750s was a direct imitation of slightly earlier Vincennes models of 1752–53 attributable to French court silversmith Jean-Claude Duplessis. And Chelsea vases produced toward the end of the decade and into the early 1760s were in a progressively more idiosyncratic rococo style, which suggests the factory was attempting to keep pace with an imagined French production of which direct knowledge, because of the conflict, was di≈cult to come by. At the conclusion of hostilities, with increased ease of access to Paris, Chelsea and its clients must have been surprised to discover that French porcelain had in the meantime largely abandoned the rococo and was manufacturing objects in an early neoclassical taste.⁄· So we see that, throughout the late 1750s, Chelsea was conducted largely by Francophone foreigners and produced numerous wares inspired by French imports. It is of note then that the factory was capable of engaging in anti-Gallican rhetoric. A striking bonbonnière produced by Chelsea sometime between 1758 and 1766, an example of which is found in the collections of the British Museum, assumes the form of the British lion devouring the Gallic cockerel.¤‚ A ribbon draped across the cockerel bears the motto “malgré ta fierte tu peris” (In spite of your pride you will perish). This object is a rare example of an overt political statement in Chelsea porcelain. The presence of so many personnel from the Francophone world in the factory, and of the confirmed Protestant Charles Gouin at the factory’s establishment,¤⁄ has long resulted in assumptions about the Huguenot, or Protestant, identities of the leading members of the Chelsea manufactory, including proprietor Nicholas Sprimont.¤¤ Earlier commentators saw this bonbonnière as an expression of a confessionally motivated anti-French stance on the part of a Huguenot Sprimont.¤‹ It has become apparent, however, that the simple characterization of the Chelsea factory as a “Protestant” concern is di≈cult to maintain. Today, the identification of Sprimont as a Huguenot is far less certain than it once was. Indeed, the only real evidence that might suggest Sprimont’s Protestantism is his close association with known Protestants, including the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac, who probably provided the model of Hogarth’s dog Trump to the Chelsea factory, and stood as godfather to Sprimont’s daughter Sophie.¤› But Sprimont also appears to have freely associated with Roman Catholics. 64

continental porcelain made in england Willems, his chief modeler, born in 1715 in Brussels in the Catholic Netherlands and related by marriage to the Catholic Nollekens family of artists, was almost certainly a Catholic.¤fi Hilary Young has rightly questioned any simple characterization of the relationship between Protestantism and anti-Gallicanism.¤fl Founded in 1745 in the midst of the French War and the Jacobite invasion crisis and holding quarterly meetings in London,¤‡ the Antigallican Society’s primary agenda appears to have been commercial, and only secondarily culturally nationalistic. It was concerned “to promote the british manufacturies, to extend the commerce of England, to discourage the introducing of French Modes, and to oppose the Importation of French Commodities.”¤° Between 1751 and 1753, the society o∑ered financial premiums “to those who shall excel in any of the mechanical or manufactural arts, for the benefit of our Commerce.”¤· Premiums were awarded for the making of bone lace, the design of a brocade pattern, English fine lace suitable for ladies’ lappets, and men’s needlework ruΩes, one of the prizes for the latter being won by a migrant worker from Saxony.‹‚ The protection and promotion of English manufacturing industries espoused by the Antigallican Society aligned quite well with the public advertising and commercial activities of Sprimont’s Chelsea factory. Indeed, in 1752, Sprimont himself published an anonymous plea to the government—the Case of the Undertaker of the Chelsea Manufacture of Porcelain Ware—calling for a prohibition on the illegal import, not of French, but of Meissen porcelain in order to assist the nascent Chelsea manufactory.‹⁄ Sprimont’s primary goal was clearly the advancement of his own business interests. His factory’s imitation of French models was an acknowledgement of the market’s taste for French porcelain wares and was hardly in accord with the Antigallican Society’s declared intent to “discourage the introducing of French Modes,” but his marketing of his products as English was. Young has suggested that a more obviously anti-Gallic, anti-Catholic reference might be detected in the well-known porcelain busts of the Duke of Cumberland produced at Chelsea around 1748. The duke’s victory at the Battle of Culloden was instrumental in the crushing of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. The Catholic Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s invasion of Scotland and England had been financed by France, and anti-Jacobite propaganda promoted the idea that a Stuart restoration would see Britain fall under French influence and serve French interests.‹¤ Young further suggested that it is thus possible that, with 65

matthew martin the model of Cumberland, Sprimont expressed public approval of the defeat of a Catholic prince seen as a pawn of the French and whose victory could have plunged England into political and economic turmoil. But we must be cautious about attributing to Sprimont personal ideological motives for the production of any particular porcelain model at Chelsea, no matter how potentially symbolically charged its subject matter might have been. The evidence adduced thus far indicates that Sprimont’s manufactory was cosmopolitan in both its makeup and its outlook and that Sprimont actively engaged in e∑orts to advantageously position his factory and its products in the English marketplace, an economic not political motive. Any explanation of the motivations for Chelsea producing the bust of the Duke of Cumberland and the overtly anti-Gallican bonbonnière must also encompass the factory’s production of small but important groups of sculptures produced in the late 1750s and 1760s that employ explicitly Counter-Reformation devotional imagery: a group of the Vırgin and Child (Figure 3.1); and a Pietà group, after the marble Pietà by Nicholas Coustou in the choir of Notre Dame de Paris (Figure 3.2). Both of these religious groups were modeled by Joseph Willems, and the mention of the Vırgin and Child model in the catalogues of the Chelsea factory’s public London sales of 1755, 1756, and 1761 suggests that this model at least was intended for the home market—that is to say, it was not a production created specifically for export to the Continent.‹‹ The general lack of evidence for any significant involvement of the factory in export trade also suggests that the Pietà group was also intended for the domestic market. These models have long caused consternation to scholars of English porcelain who accepted the characterization of the Chelsea factory as a “Protestant” concern.‹› However, in the absence of any staunchly Protestant character attributable to Chelsea and its activities, the production of porcelain sculptures employing Counter-Reformation imagery takes on, in this regard at least, a less immediately problematic cast. Indeed, as the director of a commercial enterprise, Nicholas Sprimont must have identified a market for these objects—why else were they produced? As it happens, Catholic Counter-Reformation art was surprisingly common in eighteenth-century English collections. Clare Haynes argues that Protestant English elites had, by the middle of the eighteenth century, developed strategies for engaging with Counter-Reformation images.‹fi Such images were unavoidable, as some of the most admired art 66

Figure 3.2. Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c. 1761.

matthew martin of the day was created by Catholic artists for Catholic patrons and possessed explicitly Catholic content. In order to be able to acquire French and Italian paintings, and enjoy the prestige that accrued from French and Italian cultures, Protestant elites pursued a policy of aestheticizing such works, construing their merits in terms of composition and technical accomplishment while bracketing out their problematic symbolic content. Images like these Chelsea groups were not, therefore, automatically unacceptable to a Protestant English audience simply on the basis of their Catholic subject matter. Not all Counter-Reformation imagery in the eighteenth century was necessarily susceptible to such strategies of mediation, and Young’s suggestion that the Chelsea religious groups may have been regarded in a manner similar to the Old Master religious paintings in English collections is not without problems.‹fl Sculpture in particular remained especially problematic because of its overt associations with idolatry, and religious sculpture in eighteenth-century England remained exceedingly rare, sculpture employing overtly Counter-Reformation imagery even more so.‹‡ As three-dimensional objects, the Chelsea groups would have shared this ostracism. But more significantly, an eighteenth-century English collector could justify the inclusion of a religious image by Raphael or Guido Reni in his picture collection because it was a Raphael or a Reni. Willems was no Guido Reni, no matter how fine his work, and the benefits accrued from possessing an example of his art were correspondingly reduced. It was the perceived status of an artist in contemporary connoisseurship that benefited the collector’s cultural capital through ownership of their work. Also, the status of the porcelain medium itself was not likely to have been adequate to justify acquisition of one of the religious groups. If a porcelain sculpture was desired as a public marker of taste, why would a collector then not simply acquire a large-scale group on a classical subject, like Willems’s Roman Charity? We must conclude that the subject matter of the figure groups was in itself important. In this regard, it is interesting to note that the three extant versions of the Pietà group evidence decoration, which suggests that they were in fact intended to function as devotional images in a context of Catholic domestic piety. The earliest of the groups, from the Red Anchor period (c. 1756–58)—named for the red color of the characteristic painted anchor factory mark—bears naturalistic polychrome enamel decoration, including a distinctive pattern of red, five-pointed stars applied to the Virgin’s mantle. This motif is highly reminiscent of 68

continental porcelain made in england the Marian rosa mystica (a symbol deriving from the notion that the Virgin Mary, born without the taint of original sin, was the rose without thorns), decorating numerous late medieval images of the Passion, especially from Northern Europe, where they serve as a symbolic reference to the five wounds of Christ. Counter-Reformation devotion to the wounds—the devout are sometimes depicted drinking blood from them—emphasized the material presence of the salvific blood of Christ in the elements of the Eucharist and, in so doing, evoked the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The five-pointed stars here thus appear to be an explicitly Counter-Reformation devotional detail.‹° The second version of the model, produced during the factory’s Gold Anchor period (1759–72), is known from two examples. The first of these, in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, dated to around 1761, is in unadorned white-glazed porcelain and is set upon an integral porcelain pedestal base decorated in a mazarine blue ground with tooled gilt decoration that includes a depiction of the Lamb of God (Agnus Dei ) against a sunburst, with the inscription Agnus occisus a [sic] origine mundi, another explicitly Eucharistic reference.‹· A second example of the Gold Anchor version now in the Cleveland Museum of Art is finished with polychrome enamels and also includes a porcelain plinth decorated in a mazarine blue ground.›‚ This plinth is decorated with tooled gilt ornament and a polychrome vignette, reminiscent of Rubens in style, depicting Jesus’s entombment, with gold borders including images of the Instruments of the Passion (arma Christi ).›⁄ Willems’s model of the Pietà derived from the great marble group by Nicolas Coustou above the high altar in the choir of Notre Dame de Paris, a work originally part of a larger installation commemorating the birth of Louis XIV and the vow of Louis XIII dedicating the Kingdom of France to the Virgin Mary.›¤ Willems’s porcelain group may have been intended as a souvenir for English travelers who had viewed Coustou’s famous work as they passed through Paris on the Grand Tour. Indeed, the eighteenth-century installation of the Coustou Pièta in Notre Dame originally included a gilt-bronze mise au tombeau, or entombment relief by François Girardon adorning the front of the altar. The Chelsea group with the entombment vignette on its plinth appears to make a direct allusion to this original configuration. But additional details of the decoration on surviving examples of the various versions of the porcelain group argue against such an interpretation. Why add Counter-Reformation iconographic details like the arma Christi to the 69

matthew martin entombment scene, for instance? And the ornament evoking the rosa mystica, along with the depiction of the Agnus Dei and the quotation from Revelation in Latin on the other examples, seem to serve only to heighten the Catholic devotional resonances of these images.›‹ Similar observations may be made about the Chelsea Vırgin and Child group, a figure that survives in much larger numbers. A direct source model for this group has yet to be identified, so the idea that this group might have served as a reminiscence of an artwork viewed on the Grand Tour is less tenable. The iconographic type of the group is a variant of Maria Vıctoria, Our Lady of Victories, itself a variant of the Immaculate Conception iconography ubiquitous in Spanish and Flemish CounterReformation art.›› The seated Virgin Mary presents her son, who stands beside her atop the terrestrial globe, crushing the serpent of original sin and heresy beneath. The Christ Child’s left arm reaches out to hold the right arm of his mother, returning her embrace, pointing to her role as Maria Ecclesia—Mary as Christ’s bride and his Church—and a≈rming her role as co-redemptrix, a theological position emphasized by Counter-Reformation theologians and denied by Protestants.›fi That it is Maria Vıctoria that is represented is reinforced by the additional decoration found on the plinth of the Gold Anchor period version of the group in the British Museum. Here in tooled gilt we find a trophy formed of three traditional emblems of victory: the palm, the wreath, and the laurel branch.›fl But there is something else very interesting about the subjects of the two Chelsea religious images, the Pietà and the Vırgin and Child. There are two churches in Paris containing these images that have important associations with the Vow of Louis XIII. One is Notre Dame de Paris, with the great Pietà by Coustou. The other is the basilica of Notre-Dame des Victoires in the second arrondissement, a Marian shrine built by the Augustinian Fathers commencing in 1629, financed by Louis XIII, who named the church in gratitude for the victory of French forces over the Huguenots at the Siege of La Rochelle (1627–28). The sanctuary is graced by several paintings by Carle Van Loo, including that of the life of St. Augustine, and, over the altar, that of the Vow of Louis XIII, with a depiction of the Virgin and Child that employs an iconography related to that of the Chelsea group. ›‡ It was at this church that the Augustinian Frère Fiacre de Sainte-Marguerite received a vision of the Virgin who conveyed to him instructions concerning the spiritual discipline that the Queen Anne of Austria 70

continental porcelain made in england should undertake in order to produce an heir. Nine months after the queen completed the prescribed public novenas, in 1638, she gave birth to a child, the future Louis XIV. The church thus also became associated with his “miraculous” birth, the event celebrated by the sculptural monuments at Notre Dame de Paris.›° Both of the Chelsea groups then are not only sculptural works that possess powerful Roman Catholic associations, but they also can both be linked to French national monuments associated with Louis XIV and even, in the case of Notre-Dame des Victoires, anti-Protestant sentiment. Both groups are, iconographically speaking, examples of Andachtsbilder: images where holy figures are presented, extracted from any narrative context, to form a focus for devotional contemplation; a class of image that, due to its lack of explicit foundation in scriptural text, found little favor with Reformation theologians. Both porcelain groups are symbolically highly charged artworks whose decoration suggests they were intended to function as devotional images. For whom might the Chelsea factory have produced these figures? I have argued elsewhere that these figure groups were most likely intended for, if not actually commissioned by, members of the English recusant elite, many of whom remained, despite su∑ering legal discrimination, actively involved in the social and cultural world of their day, including in the realms of patronage and collecting.›· In the absence of political roles, recusant elites might actively seek to enhance their status through patronage of the arts, just as their Protestant peers did. But they often pursued these activities in a fashion that reflected their distinctive English Catholic identities. Many Catholic families were highly cosmopolitan, as their religion gave them ready entrée into aristocratic circles on the Continent. They were also early and enthusiastic Grand Tourists. Catholic families of means educated their children on the Continent, Catholic schools being illegal in England, and a number of families maintained residences in Paris or Brussels, alongside their English seats.fi‚ A sense of membership in a European Catholic aristocratic culture, however, did not in any way preclude these families from deeming themselves loyal English subjects. Owning a costly luxury object like a Chelsea religious group would have fulfilled the requirement for having an appropriate image to form the focus of private devotions, and satisfied the desire present amongst eighteenth-century English elites to acquire fashionable luxury commodities, like porcelain sculpture.fi⁄ The small number of extant 71

matthew martin examples and the distinctive decorative treatments employed for each suggest that the Chelsea Pietà groups in particular may have been the products of private commissions. For a Catholic patron, a lavish devotional image served as a visual statement of their membership in a European Church whose traditions embraced the role of the visual arts in nurturing piety and personal devotion. Images drawing on French sources, like the Chelsea groups, might also have served as markers of the fashionability of their owners. But in turning to the leading luxury porcelain manufacturer in England to provide such an image, a Catholic patron could make a public statement about their English loyalties. “At present the Manufacturers are solely enabled to pursue the Art [of porcelain production], through the Public Spirit and Generosity of those who think no Price too great for English Ingenuity,” our writer in the Public Advertiser of June 14, 1753, quoted previously, stated. Such sentiments presumably motivated the original owners of these Chelsea religious groups. The English ingenuity their patronage supported may well have been the product of skilled French and Flemish artists, and the religion reflected in the images acquired may well have been illegal in England, but nationalist loyalties would seem to have been just as significant to these patrons as their Catholicism. What we see revealed here is a complex interplay of identities, contingent on context. The Chelsea factory was conducted by Francophone artists—and indeed, shared language and culture must have been a major impetus for these artists coming together, rather than any particular concerns about confessional identity—but in the context of the English luxury trade, it held an English market identity that they negotiated for themselves, up to and including producing works imbued with Whiggish anti-Jacobite, and even anti-Gallican, rhetoric. Despite this, the factory could produce images recalling major French public liturgical artworks, replete with Counter-Reformation devotional resonances, for presumably Catholic patrons—the iconography of the Gold Anchor period examples of these models in particular is theologically sophisticated and complex. Such images might serve to reflect a recusant’s Catholic heritage, their solidarity with the recusant community, and their ties to a Continental Catholic culture. But in choosing to patronize the leading English luxury porcelain manufacturer of the day, a Catholic demonstrated that their religion was thoroughly grounded in an English identity, an aspect absolutely central to the self-conception of many eighteenth-century liberal English Catholics.fi¤ 72

continental porcelain made in england The Englishness of the Chelsea factory was a function of geographical location and marketing rhetoric. The majority of the factory’s artists were trained on the Continent, and this contributed greatly to the sophistication of Chelsea’s productions relative to those of other early English porcelain factories. The accomplished Franco-Flemish manner of much of the factory’s output clearly contributed to its products’ market appeal amongst an aristocratic English clientele throughout the later 1750s and 1760s. The factory’s sometimes symbolically charged productions, including artworks that appear to have been intended for members of the English Catholic elite, appealed to a surprisingly wide range of contemporary political positions. This suggests a need to modify Linda Colley’s assertion that in their continual wars against the French, eighteenth-century Britons “defined themselves as Protestants struggling for survival against the world’s foremost Catholic power.”fi‹ The cosmopolitan character of the Chelsea factory and its products speaks of the cosmopolitan nature of eighteenth-century English society, especially in and around London, where the factory was active and where its public sales took place. It was in the tussles of the marketplace that the factory aimed to create an English identity for itself, and here, at least, it would seem that Englishness could also encompass Catholicism. Within a mercantilist conception of economics, involving the struggle to gain control of a majority of a finite global wealth, the marketplace could become as much a battleground as any field of war. The luxury commodity market was especially important in this regard. Eighteenthcentury France saw its preeminence in the realm of luxury commodities as an important aspect of its struggles for global economic dominance.fi› Chelsea aimed to challenge France’s position in the English market for luxury porcelain. The irony of the Chelsea factory’s endeavors was that its market success was based at least in part upon its mastery of French forms facilitated by its Continental personnel. Chelsea does not appear to have attempted consistently to distance its products from their French inspirations, as Peter Lindfield has recently argued was the case for many British artists working in the rococo manner.fifi The overtly Anglophile imagery of the anti-Gallican bonbonnière considered above must be juxtaposed with Willems’s Pietà group and its sympathetic evocation of French Catholicism. It was in its marketplace rhetoric that nationalism tempered Chelsea’s cosmopolitanism: “Made in England” made Chelsea English. 73

matthew martin 001 Robin Smith, Hogarth, France and British Art: The Rise of the Arts in EighteenthCentury Britain (London: Paul Holbertson, 2007). 002 Cheetham proposed that a preoccupation with the relationship between art and the nation characterizes the work of British artist-theorists, from Jonathan Richardson, William Hogarth, and Joshua Reynolds, to Gilbert & George and Yinka Shonibare. See Mark Cheetham, Artwriting, Nation, and Cosmopolitanism in Britain: The “Englishness” of English Art Theory since the Eighteenth Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). 003 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). 004 See, for example, Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Fragile Diplomacy: Meissen Porcelain for European Courts, ca. 1710–63 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 005 Ronald Paulson described this as “A farcical pomp of war, parade of religion and bustle with very little business. In short, poverty, slavery and insolence with an a∑ectation of politeness.” See Paulson, Hogarth: His Life Art and Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 2:77. 006 Elizabeth Adams, Chelsea Porcelain (London: British Museum, 2001), 12. 007 Guildhall MS 8674, vol. 66:141. Hand-in-Hand Fire Insurance Policy 3320. Cited in Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, 13. 008 John Mallett, “A Painting of Nicholas Sprimont, His Family and His Chelsea Vases,” Cahiers de Mariemont XXIV–XXV (1996): 77–95. 009 La R.P.R. = la religion prétendue reformée (the Pretended Reformed Religion). The “so-called reformed religion” is an expression used to refer to the Huguenot Protestant community in France. 010 Bernard Dragesco, English Ceramics in French Archives: The Writings of Jean Hellot, the Adventures of Jacques Louis Brolliet and the Identification of the “Girlin-a-Swing” Factory (London: B. Dragesco, 1993), 14. 011 John Kenworthy-Browne, “The Wife of Joseph Willems: Mary Ann Nollekens (née Lesac),” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 19, no. 2 (2006): 249; Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, 88. 012 Quoted in Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from Eighteenth Century London Newspapers,” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 11, no. 2 (1982): 125. 013 This fact is reinforced by other sources. The luxury status of the productions of the Chelsea factory, for example, is confirmed by the testimony of Mrs. Papendiek, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte, who wrote in 1783, some fourteen years after the closure of the Chelsea factory, of the setting up of her first home years earlier: “Our tea and co∑ee set were of Common India China [i.e., Chinese porcelain imported by the English East India Company from their factory in Canton], our dinner service of earthenware [presumably referring to the fine earthenwares, like creamware, produced by the Sta∑ordshire potteries, including the Wedgwood factory], to which for our rank, there was nothing superior, Chelsea porcelain and fine India china being only for the wealthy. Pewter and Delft ware could also be had, but were inferior.” Charlotte Louise Henrietta Papendiek, Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Mrs Papendiek’s Journals (London, 1887), 1:181. Quoted in Bevis Hillier, Pottery

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continental porcelain made in england

014

015

016 017 018 019 020 021 022

023 024

025

and Porcelain 1700–1914 (London: Weidenfled & Nicolson, 1968), 81. Although these comments suggest an equivalence in quality between Chelsea porcelain and fine Asian porcelain, other sources suggest that the Asian product was still preferred by some. Elizabeth Montagu in 1750, comparing ornamental porcelain by Chelsea and Bow with her own collections, stated that such English works were not so sumptuous as her own “mighty pagodas of China and nodding Mandarins.” Anna Somers Cocks, “The Nonfunctional Use of Ceramics in the English Country House During the Eighteenth Century,” in The Fashioning and Functioning of the British Country House, eds. Gervase Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 206. On Meissen influence on Chelsea, see Errol Manners, “Meissen and England— the Baroque Influence,” in Fire and Form: The Influence of the Baroque on English Ceramics (London: The English Ceramic Circle, 2013), 27–41. On the influence of foreign models on the output of the Chelsea factory in general, see Adams, Chelsea Porcelain. Nancy Valpy, examining the Custom House records for the period 1750–70, found nine entries mentioning “China ware” (a term that could encompass both pottery and porcelain at this time). Seven of these entries concern the export of English chinaware to Ireland and two concern the export of the same to Holland. Valpy, “Extracts,” 128. There is evidence of some export trade to Portugal. See Hilary Young, “Anti-Gallicanism at Chelsea: Protestantism, Protectionism and Porcelain,” Apollo CXLVII (June 1998): 41, n15. On the meaning of the category “toys” in this period, see the definition given in the advertisement for the Chelsea factory’s public auction in December 1754 published in the Public Advertiser, Valpy, “Extracts,” 126. Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from 18th Century London Newspapers and Petworth House Archives,” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 11, no. 3 (1983): 196. Ibid., 201. Nancy Valpy, “Extracts from 18th Century London Newspapers,” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 12, no. 1 (1984): 67. Mallett, “A Painting of Nicholas Sprimont, His Family and His Chelsea Vases.” Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Snu∑ box, 1752–58, British Museum, Object number BM 1887,0307,II.165. Gouin departed in 1748–49 to establish the St. James’s factory. Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, 13; Tessa Murdoch, “Sprimont, Nicholas (bap. 1715, d. 1771),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. David Cannadine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). W. B. Honey, Old English Porcelain: A Handbook for Collectors (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 80 Malcolm Baker, “Roubilac and Chelsea in 1745,” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 16, no. 2 (1997): 224. See also Matthew Martin, “The Chelsea Pietà,” in Fire and Form, 75–90. Kenworthy-Browne, “The Wife of Joseph Willems,” 249; Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, 88.

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matthew martin 026 Young, “Anti-Gallicanism,” 35–41. 027 See Bernard Watney, “Brooks and Janssen as Antigallicans,” Transactions of the English Ceramic Circle 11, no. 1 (1981): 33–34. 028 The Antigallican Privateer, “by a Gentleman just arrived from Cadiz” (London, 1757), 4. 029 Malachy Postlethwayt, The Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (London, 1755), 2: 639. 030 D.G.C. Allan, “The Laudable Association of Antigallicans,” RSA Journal 137, no. 5398 (1989): 624–25. 031 British Museum, Landsdowne MSS. No. 289, fol. 21. See also Patricia Ferguson, “Sprimont’s Complaint: Buying and Selling Continental Porcelain in London (1730–1753),” in Art Antiques London Catalogue, Incorporating the International Ceramics Fair & Seminar 2012 (London: Haughton International Fairs, 2012), 11–21. 032 Young, “Anti-Gallicanism,” 40–41; F. J. McLynn, “Issues and Motives in the Jacobite Rising of 1745,” The Eighteenth Century 23, no. 2 (1982): 97–133. 033 F. Severne Mackenna, Chelsea Porcelain: The Gold Anchor Wares (With a Short Account of the Duesbury Period) (Leigh-on-Sea, UK: F. Lewis, 1952), 92. 034 Adams, Chelsea Porcelain, 133; Arthur Lane, English Porcelain Figures of the Eighteenth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1961), 69; Hilary Young, English Porcelain 1745–95: Its Makers, Design, Marketing and Consumption, Victoria and Albert Museum Studies in the History of Art and Design (London: V&A Publications, 1999), 37. 035 Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660–1760 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 036 Young, “Anti-Gallicanism,” 37. 037 Malcolm Baker, “Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Interior,” Journal of Design History 20, no. 4 (2007): 315; Haynes, Pictures and Popery, 27–28. 038 See Martin, “The Chelsea Pietà,” 75–90. 039 Rev. 13:8: “The lamb slain from the beginning of the world.” The Latin as read contains a clear error: a origine mundi for ab origine mundi. Such orthographic infelicities are not uncommon in recusant Latin. However, it should also be noted that French mottos that appear on Chelsea toys also frequently contain errors. It is possible that the issue lies with the literacy levels amongst the Chelsea factory’s decorators. See W. B. Honey, English Pottery and Porcelain (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1945), 122. 040 Chelsea Porcelain Factory, Pietà, c. 1761, Cleveland Museum of Art, 2019.75; Christies, London, February 11, 1991, Lot 90. 041 A source for this entombment image has yet to be identified although it is clearly very closely related to a 1788 engraving by John Goldar after Daniel Dodd (British Museum 1939, 1104.2). 042 François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries: The Reign of Louis XIV, Illustrated Catalogue A–F (Oxford: Cassirer, 1977), 170–71; 61a. 043 Martin, “The Chelsea Pietà,” 81–84.

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continental porcelain made in england 044 Séverine Darroussat, “François-Nicolas Delaistre et sa Vierge présentant l’Enfant à Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs à Paris: un rendez-vous manqué avec la gloire,” Bulletin Monumental 162, no. 2 (2000): 101–16; Stefano Pierguidi, “Nascita e di∑usione di una rara iconografia dell’immocaloata Concezione: da Figino e Caravaggio a Bourdon e Quellinus II,” Arte Lombardo, Nuova serie 157, no. 3 (2009): 39–48; Jacques Thuillier, Michel Hilaire, and Jean-Louis Faure, Sébastien Bourdon 1616–1671: catalogue critique et chronologique de l’oeuvre complet, Musées de Strasbourg, Musée Fabre (Montpellier) (Paris: Reunion des musées nationaux, 2000), 259. 045 Judith Glatzer Weshler, “A Change in the Iconography of the Song of Songs in 12th and 13th century Latin Bible,” in Texts and Responses: Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday by his Students, eds. Nahum Norbert Glatzer, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 73–93. 046 British Museum 1948, 1203.57 047 On these iconographic types of Flemish origin, with the Christ Child standing to one side of and being held by the Virgin, see Darroussat, “François-Nicolas Delaistre,” 101–16. 048 Gabriel de St Claire, La vie du vénérable frère Fiacre Augustin Déchaussé (Paris: André Cailleau, 1722). 049 Martin, “The Chelsea Pietà,” 84–85. 050 See, for example, Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology, Studies in Early Modern Cultural Political and Social History 7 (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2009); Peter Marshall and Geo∑rey Scott, eds., Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700) (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009). 051 See Dragesco, English Ceramics in French Archives. 052 See, for example, the writings of Joseph Berrington: The State and Behaviour of English Catholics (London, 1780); Reflections addressed to the rev. John Hawkins. To which is added an exposition of Roman Catholic principles in reference to God and the country (Birmingham, 1785). 053 Colley, Britons, 5. 054 On mercantilism and the eighteenth-century French luxury textile trade, see Elisabeth Mikosch, “The Manufacture and Trade of Luxury Textiles in the Age of Mercantilism,” Textiles in Trade: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium, September 14–16, 1990 (Washington, DC: Textile Society of America, 1990), 53–64. 055 Peter Lindfield, “National Identity through Design: the Anglicisation of the Rococo in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in Rule Britannia? Britain and Britishness 1707–1901, eds. Peter Lindfield and Christie Margrave (New Castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 3–41.

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Figure 4.1. Monticello, Virginia.

chapter 4

Planting Cosmopolitan Ideals: Thomas Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest jennifer milam

I

n 1806, Thomas Je∑erson wrote to his friend and frequent correspondent Elizabeth Trist that he was “preparing an occasional retreat in Bedford, where I expect to settle some of my grandchildren.”⁄ Trist thought it “a good plan to avoid being run down with company,” as was often the case at Monticello (Figure 4.1), his more regular and well-known home near Charlottesville.¤ Poplar Forest (Figure 4.2) lies ninety miles further south, situated east of the Peaks of Otter and southeast of the Natural Bridge, both of which Je∑erson included as distinctive features of the American landscape in his Notes on the State of Vırginia (1785). This manuscript was a response to a number of queries posed by the secretary of the French legation in Philadelphia, François Barbé-Marbois, who had requested information about each state’s natural resources, geography, history, and government on behalf of France. Je∑erson anticipated its readers would be men and women in the transatlantic republic of letters. It is a key text for understanding the entangled strands of cosmopolitanism and patriotism in Je∑erson’s thought, specifically in relation to time and history.‹ As is often noted in the publicity connected with Poplar Forest, a little-known house museum that Je∑erson’s Notes on the State of Vırginia was drafted there while the author was recovering from a riding injury. The place gains a certain authority in the mythology of Je∑erson from this association. Landscape, it is implied, inspired themes of patriotism and nation-building within his text. This is not the only house museum 79

Figure 4.2. Poplar Forest, Virginia.

Figure 4.3. Montpelier, Virginia.

jennifer milam where such connections were drawn. The landscape of Montpelier, viewed from the window of what is now the “Restoration Room,” sometimes dubbed the “Constitution Room,” is similarly represented as having stirred Madison as he edited his Notes on Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787.› As Kate Haulman has remarked in “George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” part of the “unspoken” mission of the historic estates of the early American presidents is “to celebrate heroism and the genteel leadership” of the Founding Fathers.fi Although Haulman is critical, even damning of “the almost total absence of slavery, enslaved people and gender” in the presentation of Mount Vernon to the public, she begins her piece with an opening sentence that reads, “Visually, Mount Vernon never fails to impress” whether, as she says, the grounds are approached by foot or boat.fl It is the landscape that sets the stage for any interpretation of such a historic estate, even interpretations that fail to materialize because of the continued focus on the relationship between the resident’s private life, his or her political achievements, and the discourse of patriotism. Haulman’s purpose is to draw attention to the missed interpretive and educative opportunities of the house tour, a criticism that is also launched by Edward Baptist in his book The Half Has Never Been Told (2014): “Millions of people each year visit plantation homes where guides blather on about furniture and silverware. As sites, such homes hid the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world.”‡ These recent historical critiques are important because, without intending to, they draw attention to the significance of both the visual and the natural world in framing our understanding of the experience of these places—in other words, not just the visual impression of Mount Vernon made on Haulman, but also the allusion to the beating hot sun of Virginia in Baptist’s remarks. Landscape sets the stage before the house is even seen. It makes the first impression on the visitor’s imagination, long before the house is glimpsed. This has always been the case, as evidenced by the numerous visitor’s accounts of the approaches to Monticello and Montpelier (Figure 4.3), as well as described juxtapositions of house and setting. Author Margaret Bayard Smith’s description of her ascent up the mountain to Monticello, where she expected upon entering the outer gate that designated the boundary of the estate to find at every turn some view of the house, but instead saw a landscape over which “nature seemed to hold an undisturbed dominion,” 82

planting cosmopolitan ideals is well known. Upon reaching the summit, the “sublime scenery” and the house of Monticello competed equally for her attention. Indeed, she first noted the “country cover’d with woods, plantations & houses; beyond arose the blue mountains, in all their grandeur!” before passing to “Monticello rising 5000 feet above the river, of a conical form and standing by itself.”° Lawyer and inventor John Latrobe was similarly concerned with the approach to Montpelier, passing “through a dense forest for a considerable distance . . . until you descry [sic] at the end of a straight alley in the wood. . . . Entering this, you find yourself in a clearing, surrounded on all sides by the forest. . . . Close against the opposite woods, you see the mansion of Mr Madison.”· But this was not the end of the journey. Latrobe’s description continues: “You now pass through a very large field, lying fallow at this time. . . . Another gate admits you to the plantation, which belongs, more immediately to the establishment; and stopping at a small gate, in a very hand some [sic] paling, you ascend the gravel walk and find yourself under the portico of Montpelier.”⁄‚ As with Smith’s sense of “an endless road” leading to Monticello, Latrobe’s account gives his reader a sense of the extensive landscape that is an inescapable part of the experience of visiting Madison’s house. There is no doubt that both Je∑erson and Madison intended visitors to take in the landscape first, before reaching their houses. Individual interpretations of the meanings carried by that landscape would have varied— extending to notions of property and cultivation of the land, as well as to contrasts between nature and civilization—but the sense of place was determined in that approach. Even in current discourse, historians cannot remove the sense of place, specifically the landscape, from the framework of their presentations of American history via the house museum. A response to the natural environment is inescapable. On my own visits to four presidential house museums in Virginia— Mount Vernon, Montpelier, Monticello, and Poplar Forest—the natural landscape loomed large over the designed landscape as a defining feature of the plantation homes of the first, third, and fourth presidents of the United States. To prioritize the exterior experience of the landscape over the interior experience of material culture, I avoided the house tours in order to focus on the natural setting and the ornamental gardens. This initial approach informed the more in-depth fieldwork that I carried out in these spaces between 2014 and 2016. This essay brings together that experiential emphasis on place to explore 83

jennifer milam the relationship between garden design and intellectual thought, specifically Je∑erson’s ideas related to cosmopolitan ideals and national identity, in the context of the space of Poplar Forest. Je∑erson’s interest in the creative activity of architecture was described by Smith as one of his “favourite amusements”—understood in Enlightenment terms not as a trivial pursuit, but as a use of time in which knowledge and ideas were developed and conveyed as a form of pleasurable diversion.⁄⁄ His properties at Monticello and Poplar Forest were experimental grounds on which he sought to give physical form to his ambitious political and aesthetic ideals. Je∑erson drew philosophical lessons from classical antiquity and early modern Europe, but expanded on these lessons by incorporating into his design concepts the natural world of the American landscape. Incorporated into his two most significant private building projects were landscape gardens that included ornamental plantings and planned views out into the surrounding landscape. As he would write to John Adams in 1816, the same year in which Poplar Forest was completed and ready to accommodate family visitors, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”⁄¤ For Je∑erson, dreams of the future were based in the richness of the American landscape, which had both a past and a future, but was without a history. The remark was made as part of his response to a “philosophical” letter by Adams in which Je∑erson reflected upon whether or not he would live his life (of seventy-three years) over again. Time is everpresent in his response: he refers to “this year, this day, this hour,” time that can be measured and passes irrespective of the experiences of men, much like “bodily decay” and more “abhorrent . . . body without mind,” the e∑ects of time’s passage as experienced by men.⁄‹ Time is also connected in his thoughts to his sense of himself as a cosmopolitan man living in a new world filled with promise. In response to this question concerning his own mortality, Je∑erson claims a connection to Enlightenment cosmopolitan circles through e∑ectively using his time for intellectual thought: “I might accept of time to read Grimm before I go. 15 volumes of anecdotes and incidents, within the compass of my own mind and cognisance, written by a man of genius, of taste, of point.”⁄› He then passes to a discussion of religion (the restoration of the Jesuits) to define the “destiny” and future of America: “we are destined to be a barrier against the returns of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side . . . what a Colossus shall we be when the Southern Continent 84

planting cosmopolitan ideals comes up to our mark! What a stand shall it secure as a ralliance [sic] for the reason & freedom of the globe!”⁄fi It is at this point that Je∑erson remarks on his preference for “dreams of the future” over past history, and he turns at that moment to the more personal dream of the bonds of friendship and attachment with commonminded people who will bring about that future: “so good night! I will dream on, always fancying that Mrs Adams and yourself are by my side marking the progress and the obliquities of ages and countries.”⁄fl With this quote, the paradox of particularism and universalism is pronounced within Je∑erson’s thoughts, and it is this paradox that informs the intertwined expression of national identity and cosmopolitan ideals at Poplar Forest. It is a space that is both deeply personal in response to the particularities of the Virginia landscape, and universal in its distillation of natural and architectural forms into pure geometry. While Je∑erson did receive visitors at the plantation, Poplar Forest was not a place of public display. Instead, it was conceived as a private retreat, providing Je∑erson with the opportunity to incorporate highly innovative elements into his garden designs. Using a combination of geometric forms and local plantings, he developed a unique response to the American landscape, which I contend is both cosmopolitan and patriotic in outlook. Je∑erson inherited the plantation of Poplar Forest in 1773, through his wife Martha, and he visited the property for the first time that same year.⁄‡ He did not begin building there until 1806.⁄° The original design included an octagonal house situated within ornamental grounds, all of which are included within an outer circle of 540 yards—information that is derived from Je∑erson’s planting instructions for 1812, written in December 1811.⁄· These instructions note the need for a picket fence around the garden to keep out the hares, and plans for an orchard to the south, composed mostly of peach trees, but also almond, apple, apricot, cherry, nectarine, pear, plum, and quince trees in far lesser amounts. The orchard would have been the primary vista from the loggia of the south facade, which directly overlooked a sunken lawn (Figure 4.4). This feature entailed a time-consuming process of excavation completed by Je∑erson’s enslaved workers, with the earth moved to form mounds on either side of the house. The planting memorandum for Poplar Forest in November 1812 includes directions to “plant a double row of paper mulberries” from the side projections of the house to the mounds, which had been covered the year before with “weeping willows on the top in a square 20. f. apart. 85

Figure 4.4. Poplar Forest, view from the loggia of the south facade.

Figure 4.5. Poplar Forest, roof of the wing of o≈ces.

Figure 4.6. Poplar Forest, terrace access door from bedroom (interior side).

Figure 4.7. Poplar Forest, terrace access door from bedroom (exterior side).

jennifer milam Golden willows in a circle round the middle. 15 f. apart. Aspens in a circle round the foot. 15. F. apart.”¤‚ At each corner of the house, “clumps” were to be planted composed of Athenian and Balsam poplars, intermixed with common and Kentucky locusts, redbuds, dogwoods, calycanthus, and liriodedrons.¤⁄ From his detailed directions, it is clear that Je∑erson was approaching the designed landscape as something not only to be ordered through measurement and geometry, but also to be plotted visually with an understanding of the colors, textures, and movements of specific trees and plants. So while, as C. Allan Brown has argued, the grounds can be understood architecturally, as sharing a “unity of concept” with the house, they are also distinctly living and organic, subject to the change of seasons and passage of time, as opposed to the static, inorganic, and timeless quality of neoclassical architecture.¤¤ The impression of unity that Brown observed is driven by geometry—a carefully planned combination of circles, rectangles, and octagons, systematically composed around a general principle of axial symmetry.¤‹ While certainly justified by an understanding of these garden features as conceptually connected to the building, treating nature primarily as another architectural feature nevertheless downplays the emphasis that Je∑erson placed on his selection of natural forms. It is this combination of static architecture and living plantings that is distinctive to Je∑erson’s approach to landscape design and, I would argue, is connected to his unique appreciation of the American landscape as part of both absolute and relative time.¤› To accommodate service functions, the original design of Poplar Forest was modified in 1814 to incorporate a wing of o≈ces on one side, the roof of which e∑ectively functioned as a viewing platform out onto the designed landscape (Figure 4.5). Je∑erson wrote in 1817 that he and his granddaughters, Cornelia and Ellen, would “sally out with the owls and bats, and take our evening exercise on the terras [sic].”¤fi A door leads from one of the bedroom octagons directly onto the terrace platform (Figures 4.6–4.7). In one direction, the outlook is toward the sunken lawn connected to the south facade. Peach orchards would have been the most likely view forming the backdrop to the designed domestic landscape. In the other direction, the vista takes in the Blue Ridge Mountains in the far distance (Figure 4.8).¤fl Beyond the outer circle, and potentially screened by plantings, were the slave quarters. While the life of enslaved people at Poplar Forest has been a primary focus of archaeological site investigations, the living quarters of the enslaved people who worked in the house are rarely connected to aesthetic issues in studies of the architectural site.¤‡ This may derive 90

Figure 4.8. Poplar Forest, view toward the Blue Ridge Mountains from the roof of the wing of o≈ces.

jennifer milam from concepts behind the original designs. Slavery needed to be made invisible (conceptually, if not practically) from the creation of a space and landscape that was intended to represent visually an expression of absolute time and the universal ideals of the Enlightenment. This was not the case at Monticello or at James Madison’s Montpelier, where carefully constructed arrangements of the living and working conditions of enslaved people were put on view to visitors. These areas are now known as Mulberry Row at Monticello and the South Yard at Montpelier. Both plantation estates had other areas where enslaved people lived and worked, but these were not incorporated into their designed landscapes in the same way. Instead, Mulberry Row and the South Yard were distinguished by their proximate relationship to the main house and visibility from it. Both were incorporated into the household space, as much a part of the designed landscape as the ornamental gardens that were contiguous with the main house and with the workshops and slave quarters. It is appropriate, therefore, to consider Mulberry Row and the South Yard as uniquely American responses to the European ferme-ornée or Georgian model farm.¤° As noted by John Martin Robinson, the woods and farms of landed estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, France, and other parts of Europe have largely been studied in terms of their economic and agricultural improvement, and for their country houses and ornamental gardens.¤· The architecture and forms of more utilitarian buildings, and the wider design context of the woods of estates, in which country houses and gardens were set, are often overlooked. Yet, country houses, ornamental gardens, kitchen gardens, model farm buildings, and paths through the woods were treated as a single entity, rather than separate parts. This is particularly true of the country houses of the early American presidents that responded to and incorporated the wilderness of the native landscape, such as through the vistas o∑ered from the front porch of Mount Vernon, the sidewalk terraces of Monticello, and the first-floor rooftop terraces of Montpelier. The terraces at Montpelier functioned as viewing platforms, not only of the Virginia landscape to the north of the house, but also of the garden parterres planted to the south. Such views taken together showed o∑ the natural and cultivated landscape of the Madisons’ plantation home. More extraordinary was the view directly down from the southeast corner of the side terrace onto a symmetrically planned composition of enslaved workers’ quarters (Figures 4.9–4.11), incorporating into the larger landscape the reinvention of a model village. 92

Figure 4.9. Montpelier, 1837 insurance map showing relationship between terrace corner and South Yard.

Figure 4.10. Montpelier, side terrace to South Yard.

Figure 4.11. Montpelier, view from side terrace down to South Yard.

jennifer milam Drawing from the tradition of farm and hermit follies found in European gardens of the eighteenth century, the South Yard restyled the concept as a new feature of the American designed landscape. Slave life was idealized and performed for visitors to Montpelier, many of whom were foreign, to demonstrate a harmonious and hierarchical coexistence. Such an ideal is expressed in the 1818 drawing by the French artist Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville (Figure 4.12), where an enslaved woman and child stand just outside the fence and opposite the temple. A perspectival distortion, the garden folly is placed to emphasize “natural” distinctions within the landscape, as they would have appeared to the Madisons. The temple stands as a reference to the European culture imported into the gardens surrounding the house; whereas the enslaved figures are presented as part of a wider landscape of the estate, similarly not native to the place, but distinctive in their relationship to the Virginian plantation and the Madison family. It is no accident that Hyde de Neuville placed these enslaved figures along the primary diagonal line with Madison and his guest, who stand framed by the central columns of the portico. An idealized impression of slave life at Montpelier was also recorded, at a much later date, in the memoirs of Mary Cutts, Dolley Madison’s niece.‹‚ Cutts described the barbeques at Montpelier with a sense of animating the landscape: “At these feasts the woods were alive with guests, carriages, horses, servants and children—for all went—often more than a hundred guests.” The evening would end with dancing to the music of enslaved workers, “‘Uncle Tom’s’ and ‘Uncle Sam’s,’” who continued with their own festivities: “the slaves animated by the sight of the enjoyment of their masters and mistresses, of whose feast they have partaken, when their duties are over, assemble in the largest cabin, call in house servants and field hands, tune up the violin and make the plantation resound, until morning, with their gaiety and mirth.”‹⁄ The incorporation of the slave “village” functioned as a visual defense of slavery in the landscape of the plantation estate. While perhaps less an overt defense of slavery than an ideal framing of the complete domestic environment at Monticello as under the protective, productive, and paternal care of the owner of the plantation estate,‹¤ Je∑erson’s Mulberry Row similarly projected the conception of a perfectly ordered microcosm of American society that included the lives and industry of enslaved workers. The visibility of this plantation street as part of the first circuit walk, as well as the activity it contained 96

Figure 4.12. Anne Marguerite Hyde de Neuville, President James Madison’s House in Montpelier, Vırginia, 1818.

Figure 4.13. View from the roof of Monticello, across the South Terrace, the first roundabout, Mulberry Row, and the kitchen garden.

planting cosmopolitan ideals and its integral relationship to the larger landscaped gardens (Figure 4.13), was commented upon by Smith in her description of the estate in 1809: a walk was proposed & he accompanied us. He took us first to the garden. . . . It is on the south side of the mountain & commands a most noble view. . . . We afterwards walked the first circuit. . . . It is in general shady, with openings through the trees for distant views. We passed the out houses for the slaves & work men; they are all much better, than I have seen on any other plantation, but to an eye unaccustomed to such sights, they appear poor & these cabins form a most unpleasant contrast with the palace that rises so near them.‹‹

While Smith’s aesthetic assessment of Mulberry Row is critical, it nevertheless takes in the fundamental connection between the gardens, views into the landscape, slave quarters, and country house while on the circuit walk.‹› Smith’s use of the term “circuit” to describe the four concentric paths and roads that encircled the mountain, referred to by Je∑erson as “roundabouts” in his Garden Book, is suggestive. It draws attention to the potential for these paths taken through the garden to be connected with the “circuit” principle of eighteenth-century European garden design whereby multiple views and experiences were arranged for the visitor as he or she moved through or walked around the garden.‹fi While some European gardens used the circuit walk as a means to order a sequence of destinations along the walk and to convey specific allegorical meanings, others did not.‹fl Je∑erson was familiar with the broad perimeter walk at Woburn Farm, for example, which he visited in 1786.‹‡ The circuit at Woburn defined movement around the pleasure garden and served to provide a succession of planned picturesque views both into the farm and out onto the countryside.‹° Not just for visitors, the circuit path also provided the owner with an e∑ective means for surveying his property. Philip Southcote, the patron of Woburn Farm, described his choice of a circumferential walk as “for convenience as well as pleasure,” allowing him to “see what was doing in the grounds” and to “have a pleasing access” to any part “where I might be wanted.”‹· The circuit path would have appealed to Je∑erson on an aesthetic level and from the perspective of e∑ective estate management.›‚ He was impressed with Woburn and compared it favorably to some of the Continental gardens he most admired, recommended as “Objects of Attention for an American” while 99

jennifer milam traveling in Europe.›⁄ Of Woburn, Je∑erson noted that the farm, pleasure garden, and kitchen garden were “all intermixed, the pleasure garden being merely a highly ornamented walk through and around the divisions of the farm and kitchen garden.”›¤ As at Woburn, the walk along the “first circuit” at Monticello united the spaces of pleasure and utility. By incorporating European design elements such as the circuit walk, Je∑erson demonstrated his cosmopolitan learning and taste, which was a widely acknowledged aspect of his lifestyle, both during his presidency and in retirement. At the same time, he modified European influences with direct references to the local context by providing a planned experience along the circuit walk that visualized his promotion of the native American landscape, the productive plantation estate, and the economic and domestic structures of Virginia that continued to rely upon the labor of enslaved people. To address briefly why I believe the “cosmopolitan” is useful when exploring Je∑erson’s approach to garden design, specifically at Poplar Forest, it is necessary to define my usage of the term. As Hannah Spahn has remarked in her work on cosmopolitanism and Je∑erson, “cosmopolitan” embodied seemingly contradictory meanings within Enlightenment thought: it referred both to an “abstract conviction of the unity of mankind and to a very concrete recognition that universal principles have to be adjusted to the particularities of the world as it presented to the senses.”›‹ The physical experience of nature in relative time is pertinent here. Cosmopolitan ideals within Enlightenment thought are a qualified universalism—becoming particular in their inclination toward the sensory and emotional attraction of the local and the individual, as has been discussed by Spahn, Michael Henry Scrivener, and Kwame Anthony Appiah in their analyses of the etymology and theorization of the cosmopolitan ideal and cosmopolitan reading.›› The cosmopolitan ideal has yet to be connected to an experience of place in the American garden. Prior to visiting Poplar Forest, my own reading of the site as “cosmopolitan” was largely in terms of the neoclassical deployment of pure geometric forms (both architectural and in shaped plantings) that represented the universal qualities of an aesthetic taste commonly shared across European culture in the late eighteenth century, when Je∑erson’s own architectural tastes were developed in Europe. Such a reading was reinforced by notable quotes from Je∑erson, in which he related his own experiences to that of the ancient past: “I read nothing, 100

planting cosmopolitan ideals therefore, but the heroes of Troy, of Pompey and Caesar, and of Augustus too. I slumber without fear, and review in my dreams the visions of antiquity.”›fi Je∑erson’s papers are full of quotes that can be rallied for the purposes of supporting a cosmopolitan perspective. The forms of Poplar Forest also expressed the nature of time as absolute—providing the design with an achronic temporality. At once, the forms drew from primordial nature, seen embodied in the planned views to be enjoyed from the house,›fl and from the notion of absolute time and space commonly shared by humanity. I was also interpreting this cosmopolitanism in connection with the assessment of one of the few contemporary visitors to Poplar Forest, George Flower, an Englishman who described the estate in 1816: “I found Mr Je∑erson at his Poplar Forest estate, in the western part of the State of Virginia. His house was built after the fashion of a French chateau, Octagonal rooms, floors of polished oak, lofty ceilings, large mirrors betokened his French taste, acquired by his long residence in France. . . . His two grand-daughters—Misses Randolph—well educated and accomplished young ladies, were staying with him at the time.”›‡ While Flower interpreted the neoclassical forms as belonging to current tastes in France, as opposed to the more commonly experienced Colonial style of architecture taken from English pattern books, the aesthetic was decidedly European in cultural outlook, a defining feature of Enlightenment civilization brought to and re-formed in the wilds of Virginia. Visiting Poplar Forest, however, I began to think di∑erently about the space. Sensory response was too particular, especially when moving through, between, and across the house and garden spaces: the sensations of time passing as the hour of the day progressed and weather changed, and the perception of time as connected to the season. There is, however, a duality of time in nature. It is both particular (of a certain day and a specific season in a given year) and perpetual (constantly renewed and re-experienced). It can be experienced and interpreted as both relative and absolute, to use terms most commonly associated with theories of time during the Enlightenment. Similarly, neoclassicism was a style that attempted to transcend di∑erences of time and place— it was simultaneously of antique Rome and eighteenth-century Paris, and it was put into use by an individual, in this case, a Virginian. This dual concept of time continued to appear important in Je∑erson’s thoughts and aesthetic choices. 101

jennifer milam Indeed, there was an obsession with time at Je∑erson’s retreats. The sound of the gong attached to the clock at Monticello was heard from everywhere in the plantation, marking time and its productive use. For this purpose, Je∑erson had two gongs imported from China. In a letter to Henry Remsen written in 1792, Je∑erson described his desire for a Chinese Gong “to serve as the bell to a clock, which might be heard all over my farm.”›° Smith remarked upon a second gong that was “placed in a tree on the lawn, to summon the workmen to their meals.”›· Sounds that marked the passage of time structured experience at Monticello—mediating between absolute and relative time—and I propose that this mindset carried over to Poplar Forest. Time, in fact, appears to have dominated the thoughts of Je∑erson’s family and from this we can speculate it would have equally impacted on the lives of enslaved workers at his plantation estates. To understand the moral imperative of time usefully spent in Je∑erson’s household, it is illuminating to read the comments of his granddaughters during an extended stay at Poplar Forest. Following a hailstorm in the summer of 1819, which significantly damaged the house, Je∑erson went to Poplar Forest to bring some necessary supplies and to oversee the rebuilding and repairs. It is from this stay that we have the most detailed, descriptive responses of Cornelia and Ellen, who were in their late teens during these visits, and they are revealing in terms of their focus on time and climate. Cornelia was the first to write about their journey in a letter to her younger sister Virginia: “We arrived here yesterday . . . after one day of the hottest sun I ever felt in my life, and one of rain.” She then continued to detail the damage caused by the hailstorm that marked the purpose of their visit.fi‚ Ellen, in writing to her mother, was more descriptive of that damage: “Poplar Forest looks rather more dismal than usual: the long absence of the family appears to have . . . increased the wildness and desolation of everything around. The weeds grow to the very door of the kitchen, as high as your head, the plans of the terrace torn up in places by the violence of the winds [. . .] and yet in spite of all this, I have felt no depression of spirits. To the contrary, there are associations and recollections, which combined with hopes for the future give me a sensation of cheerfulness and animation.”fi⁄ A letter such as this reveals a relationship to place that is highly personal, but also mixed with a temporal appreciation of change connected with family and memory that will inform the future. There are many more letters with both Ellen and 102

planting cosmopolitan ideals Cornelia remarking on “time wasted” visiting, rather than “the consciousness of time usefully, properly employed.”fi¤ They write of “plans of industry” that are regularly interrupted.fi‹ Combined with this are descriptions of the weather and heat. Ellen wrote in 1819: “Have you ever in your life known such hot weather. . . . Yesterday (the 3rd of August) it reached 99˚. Grand papa thinks that such a degree of heat has never before been known in this State.”fi› These remarks about the weather record her relative experience combined with a sense of history of place. Poplar Forest has a connection with cosmopolitan ideals, the formation of national identity, and Enlightenment notions of time. An analysis of those ideals needs to be considered not only through the writings of Je∑erson, but also through the recollections of women and enslaved people, for whom questions of temporality would have been experienced di∑erently, thus altering the reception of the space. This can be done by interpreting the few archival sources that remain, but also by connecting these fragmented letters and documents with the physical experience of the landscape through the working construction of the house and its plantings. From the letters of Je∑erson’s granddaughters, it is clear that time spent at Poplar Forest was experienced as absolute in one sense. It flowed past human experience at a constant rate, and could be measured, marking the day in hours, whether or not they were usefully spent. The neoclassical architecture and plantings that reshaped the natural world into pure geometries within the garden functioned as a visual reminder of absolute time representing the eternal truths of art and nature—an expression of universalism. Yet as with other forms of cosmopolitan thought during the Enlightenment, the universalism that informed the design of Poplar Forest was qualified by personal experience that attended to the local. It is in this sense that Poplar Forest is an expression of American cosmopolitan ideals in the designed landscape. The research for this essay was funded by a Peter Nicolaisen International Fellowship at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Je∑erson Studies, Monticello, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. I am grateful to sta∑ at Monticello, Montpelier, and Poplar Forest for assisting with access to the properties and curatorial files, and lending me their expertise. I also thank Shane White for visiting these properties with me in 2014 and his many insightful comments on that trip. Subsequent field research at the house museums in this essay took place in 2015 and 2016, while I was a fellow in residence at Monticello.

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jennifer milam 001 “From Thomas Je∑erson to Elizabeth House Trist, 27 April 1806.” Original held in the Bixby Collection, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louise, Mo. Early access transcription available from The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents /Je∑erson/99-01-02-3645. 002 “To Thomas Je∑erson from Elizabeth House Trist, 19 May 1806.” Original held in the Nicolas Philip Trist Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Early access transcription available from The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov /documents/Je∑erson/99-01-02-3738. 003 Hannah Spahn, “Thomas Je∑erson, Cosmopolitanism, and the Enlightenment,” in A Companion to Thomas Je∑erson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), ch. 23, 364–79. See also: Hannah Spahn, Thomas Je∑erson, Time, and History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011); and Peter S. Onuf, “Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Je∑erson: Epilogue,” in Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Je∑erson, eds. Peter Nicolaisen and Hannah Spahn (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013). 004 Andrea Wulf, Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). 005 Kate Haulman, “George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” a review of the house tour, Journal of American History 101, no. 3 (December 2014): 862–63. 006 Ibid. 007 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xix. 008 Margaret Bayard Smith, diary entry, 1 August 1809. Margaret Bayard Smith Papers, Commonplace Books, 1799–1843, mss40436, box 1, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D. C. Available at https://loc.gov /item/mss40436005. For a transcription, see The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson Digital Edition, eds. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Je∑erson Looney (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008–15). Available at Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Je∑erson /03-01-02-0315. 009 John H. B. Latrobe to Charles Carroll Harper, 3 August 1832, box 4, John H. B. Latrobe Family Papers, MS 523, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. The Montpelier Research Database, MRD-S 24479. 010 Ibid. For other accounts of the approach to Montpelier, see Hilarie M. Hicks, “Bounding a Charming Prospect: Documentary Views at Montpelier,” research report, June 23, 2015, Montpelier Foundation, Orange, Virginia. The Montpelier Research Database, MRD-S 43151. 011 Margaret Bayard Smith, A Winter in Washington: Or, Memoirs of the Seymour Family (New York: Bliss and White, 1824), 2:261. See my discussion of this understanding of the serious purpose of aesthetic play during this period in Jennifer Milam, Fragonard’s Playful Paintings: Vısual Games in Rococo Art (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1997).

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planting cosmopolitan ideals 012 “To John Adams from Thomas Je∑erson, 1 August 1816,” The Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Early access transcription available through Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives .gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-6618. 013 Ibid. 014 Ibid. 015 Ibid. 016 Ibid. 017 The Bedford property was bequeathed by John Wayles to his daughter, Martha Je∑erson, on May 28, 1773. Thomas Je∑erson’s first trip is recorded through payments in his Memorandum Book during September 1773. James A. Bear, Jr., and Lucia C. Stanton, eds., Je∑erson’s Memorandum Books: Accounts, with Legal Records and Miscellany, 1767–1826 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), vol. 1. On the early history of Poplar Forest, see S. Allen Chambers, Jr., Poplar Forest & Thomas Je∑erson (Forest, VA: The Corporation for Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest, 1993), 1–7. 018 In September 1805, Je∑erson sent his bricklayer and carpenter, Hugh Chisolm, from Monticello to Poplar Forest, to begin work on the house. Je∑erson’s Memorandum Books, vol. 2; and Chambers, Poplar Forest, 31. 019 Planting memoranda for Poplar Forest, Dec. 1811. See Thomas Je∑erson’s Garden Book, annotated by Edwin Morris Betts (Monticello, VA: Thomas Je∑erson Foundation, Inc., 2012), 464–68. 020 Ibid., 465 and 494. 021 Ibid., 494. 022 C. Allan Brown, “Thomas Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest: The Mathematics of an Ideal Villa,” Journal of Garden History 10, no. 2 (1990): 117–39. Brown’s study remains the most significant study to interpret the importance of Poplar Forest in relation to Je∑erson’s ideas about architecture. 023 Ibid., Fig. 3. 024 Hannah Spahn has demonstrated the pervasiveness of Je∑erson’s reflections on temporality in his writings and has related this to transitional thinking about time during the Enlightenment. Spahn, Thomas Je∑erson, Time, and History, part I. 025 “From Thomas Je∑erson to Martha Je∑erson Randolph, Poplar Forest, August 31, 1817,” in Family Letters of Thomas Je∑erson, eds. Edwin M. Betts and James Bear, Jr. (1966; Charlottesville, VA: Thomas Je∑erson Memorial Foundation, 1986), 418–19. 026 On November 25, 1820, Je∑erson recorded the sequence of views from the house, perhaps from the roof, which overseer Joel Yancey was working on at the time: “List of Mountains in order in which they are seen from Poplar Forest, beginning in the S. W. and proceeding N. Eastwardly.” The original document is in Special Collections at the University of Virginia, MSS 1539. C. Allan Brown produced a diagram from this description, which indicates potential views from individual windows, although the actual views from inside the rooms are not so clearly aligned. See Brown, “Thomas Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest,” Fig. 10.

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jennifer milam 027 Excavations of a quarter site on the eastern hillside below the main house inform archaeologist investigations into slave life at Poplar Forest in the final decades of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. Barbara Heath, Hidden Lives: The Archaeology of Slave Life at Thomas Je∑erson’s Poplar Forest (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999). 028 Rudy J. Favretti made this connection in “Thomas Je∑erson’s ‘Ferme Ornée’ at Monticello,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993): 17–29, but there is no mention of Mulberry Row. Christa Dierksheide specifically proposed the importance of Mulberry Row to Je∑erson’s personal conception of the ferme ornée at Monticello in an unpublished paper, “Improving the Plantation Landscape: Je∑erson’s Mulberry Row,” presented at the 2013 conference of the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic, St. Louis, MO. This was part of Je∑erson’s larger interest in creating an “idealized family farm” at Monticello. See Dierksheide, Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014). On the perception of the South Yard as a “model village,” see Wulf, Founding Gardeners, 223–26. Brown proposed that both Je∑erson’s and Madison’s e∑orts to organize the dwellings and workshops of enslaved people at their estates into “unified aesthetic arrangements” were part of a “trans-Atlantic movement advocating ‘model’ farms and workers’ villages.” C. Allan Brown, “Montpelier Cultural Landscape Study: Visualizing the Plantation of James and Dolley Madison,” unpublished report prepared for The Montpelier Foundation (2012), 71 and note 254, at James Madison’s Montpelier, Orange, VA. 029 John Martin Robinson, Georgian Model Farms: A Study of Decorative and Model Farm Buildings in the Age of Improvement, 1700–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983). 030 Mary Estelle Elizabeth Cutts, Memoir II [1849–1856], Cutts Family Collection of Papers of James and Dolley Madison, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. I thank the sta∑ of Montpelier for sharing their copy of this microfilm with me (Cutts Memoir II: MRD-S 23538). For more on the context and significance of these letters to understanding life at Montpelier, see The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison, ed. Catherine Allgor (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012). 031 Cutts, Memoir II. 032 Dierksheide, “Improving the Plantation Landscape.” 033 Smith, diary entry, 1 August 1809. 034 Je∑erson called the four circuit roads that encircled the mountain at di∑erent elevations “roundabouts” in his Garden Book, which spans the years 1766–1824. The original manuscript is in the Coolidge Collection of Thomas Je∑erson Manuscripts, Massachusetts Historical Society. It can be accessed and searched as a transcribed electronic edition at http://www.thomasje∑ersonpapers .org/. 035 The influence on Je∑erson of the gardens with winding walks that he saw in Europe, as well as the examples that he knew though publications such as Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening and George le Rouge’s

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planting cosmopolitan ideals Jardins Anglo-Chinois, is discussed in Rudy J. Favretti, “Thomas Je∑erson’s ‘Ferme Ornée’ at Monticello,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103 (1993): 17–29. 036 Useful discussions of the “circuit” in eighteenth-century English gardens, many of which were visited by Je∑erson, include Ronald Paulson, “The Pictorial Circuit and Related Structures in Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Varied Pattern: Studies in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Peter Hughes and David Williams (Toronto: A. M. Hakkert, 1971), 165–87; and Max F. Shulz, “The Circuit Walk of the Eighteenth-Century Landscape Garden and the Pilgrim’s Circuitous Progress,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15 (1981): 1–25. For the elaboration of cosmopolitan ideals on the circuit walk in French and Russian examples, see my articles: Jennifer Milam, “Cosmopolitan Time in the Jardin de Monceau,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscape 36, no. 4 (2016): 282–96, DOI 10.1080/14601176.2016.1161295; and Jennifer Milam, “Toying with China: Cosmopolitanism and Chinoiserie in Russian Garden Design and Building Projects under Catherine the Great,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, no. 1 (2012): 115–38. 0370“[Notes on a Tour of English Country Seats, &c., with Thomas Je∑erson, 4–10? April 1786.],” The Adams Papers, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 3: Diary, 1782–1804; Autobiography, Part One to October 1776, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 184–87. Available at Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov /documents/Adams/01-03-02-0005-0002-0001. Je∑erson’s own “Notes” are referenced below in note 42. 038 R.W. King, “The ‘Ferme Ornée’: Philip Southcote and Wooburn Farm,” Garden History 2, no. 3 (1974): 38–39. 039 Southcote’s comments are reported in Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men Collected from Conversations, ed. James M. Osborn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), I:424. 040 Max Shulz proposed that the garden mania that took hold of English patrons, such as Southcote and his contemporaries, was inextricably linked to their lives as prudent estate managers and men of the world, involved in politics and trade. Together, these activities and interests allowed them to interiorize historical processes that involved a dual understanding of linear time and timeless patterns of divine events. Shulz, “The Circuit Walk,” 14. 041 Gardens were “peculiarly worth” this attention, Je∑erson claimed, because America was “the country of all others where the noblest gardens may be made without expence [sic]. We have only to cut out the superabundant plants.” See “Je∑erson’s Hints to Americans Travelling in Europe, 19 June 1788,” The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, vol. 13, March–7 October 1788, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956), 264–76. Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents /Je∑erson/01-13-02-0173. 042 “Notes of a Tour of English Gardens, [2–14 April] 1786,” The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, vol. 9, 1 November 1785?–?22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton,

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jennifer milam NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954,), 369–75. Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Je∑erson/01-09-02-0328. 043 Spahn, “Introduction,” in Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood, 5. See also Michael Henry Scrivener, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in the Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1736–1832 (New York: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), 1. 044 Spahn, Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood, 5–6; Scrivener, Cosmopolitan Ideal, 7–33; and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Reading,” in Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture, ed. Viay Dharwadker (New York: Routledge, 2001), 197–227, esp. 202. 045 “From Thomas Je∑erson to Nathaniel Macon, 12 January 1819,” Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, U.S. Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Early access transcription available from Founders Online, National Archives, http:// founders.archives.gov/documents/Je∑erson/98-01-02-0029. 046 Je∑erson listed “Mountains in the order in which they are seen from Poplar forest, beginning in the S.W. & proceeding N. Easterwardly” in his notes. “Thomas Je∑erson’s Notes on Poplar Forest Plantings and Geography, 1 February 1811–6 October 1821,” The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, Retirement Series, vol. 3, 12 August 1810–17 June 1811, ed. J. Je∑erson Looney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 352–55. The original document is in the University of Virginia, Special Collections, item 1137, and can be accessed at Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents /Je∑erson/03-03-02-0269. 047 George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, founded in 1817 and 1818, by Morris Birbeck and George Flower (Chicago: Fergus Printing Company, 1882), 43. 048 “From Thomas Je∑erson to Henry Remsen, 13 November 1792,” The Papers of Thomas Je∑erson, vol. 24, 1 June–31 December 1792, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 616–17. Founders Online, National Archives, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Je∑erson/01-24 -02-0591. 049 Margaret Bayard Smith, “Recollections of a Visit to Monticello,” Richmond Enquirer, January 18, 1823. 0500Written from Poplar Forest, “Cornelia J. Randolph to Virginia J. Randolph, 18 July 1918.” Original held at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Randolph and Yates Family Papers, 1815–1864, 1952, Folder 1, Reel M-1998/1. Transcription published in “Je∑erson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Je∑erson Foundation, Inc., 2016, http://tjrs.monticello.org. 051 “Ellen W. Randolph (Coolidge) to Martha Je∑erson Randolph, 18 July 1819.” Written from Poplar Forest. Original held in Special Collections at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Accession no. 9090, Box 1. Facsimile and transcription published in “Je∑erson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Je∑erson Foundation, Inc., 2016, http://tjrs.monticello.org. 052 “Ellen W. Randolph (Coolidge) to Martha J. Randolph, 11 August 1819.” Letter written from Poplar Forest. Original held in the Nicolas Philip Trist Papers, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. Facsimile and transcription

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planting cosmopolitan ideals published in “Je∑erson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Je∑erson Foundation, Inc., 2016, http://tjrs.monticello.org. 053 Ibid. 054 “Ellen W. Randolph (Coolidge) to Virginia J. Randolph (Trist), 4 August 1819.” Letter written from Poplar Forest. Original in Special Collections at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Accession no. 9090, Box 1. Facsimile and transcription published in “Je∑erson Quotes & Family Letters,” Thomas Je∑erson Foundation, Inc., 2016, http://tjrs.monticello.org.

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Figure 5.1. Louis Surugue after Charles Coypel, La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse, 1745.

chapter 5

Growing Old in Public in EighteenthCentury France: Marie-Thérèse Geo∑rin and Marie Leszczyn´ska jessica l. fripp

L

ouis-Sébastien Mercier began his discussion of “Forty-year old women” in the Tableau de Paris on a decidedly depressing note: “It is a cruel situation, embarrassing for a woman who had for a long time stirred desire in men and jealousy in other women; it is the moment where her mirror tells her: you are not as charming as before . . . your beauty is fading, and although the slipping away of your appeal is imperceptible, it is no less real.”⁄ Mercier’s account of a woman aging described that aging as a slow process that gradually drained her of her very being; “she feels as if she loses her existence,” he claimed.¤ He compared the fading of her physical charms to exile, which inspired a shame even stronger than that felt by an “ambitious minister dispossessed of the power of which he was so proud and so jealous.”‹ Ultimately, eighteenth-century women had a choice: fight aging, or jump right into it. “A woman in Paris is never forty,” Mercier concluded, “she is always thirty or sixty; and as no one says otherwise, the forty-year old woman does not exist.”› As literary scholar Joan Hinde Stewart has noted, Mercier’s quote suggests that women simply disappeared when they reached the period of transition between their childbearing years and full-on old age, thought to begin at sixty, which we today associate with menopause.fi According to a number of eighteenth-century authors, “l’enfer des 111

jessica l. fripp femmes”—one of many poetic descriptions for this phase of a woman’s life—was a dangerous time. A woman’s looks were fading and her fertility declining yet her sexual appetite increased and she was likely to try her best to appear younger than her years.fl If women were tempted to pretend that their best years were not already behind them, there was plenty of material, both visual and written, to remind them how ridiculous they risked appearing and how dangerous such pretense could be for their health. For example, in an etching of Charles Coypel’s 1743 pastel La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse (Figure 5.1), a haggard old woman works very hard to keep up with fashion despite her advanced age. She sits at a lavishly equipped toilette, decorating herself with an excessive number of mouches, or fake beauty marks, and wearing ostentatious pearl jewelry and a powdered wig adorned with pompons. Folly, her unreasonable inspiration, places a stylish lace cap on her head that matches her dressing gown, a negligée closed with a ribbon, the height of fashion. In the image, Coypel played on common stereotypes of eighteenth-century women as vain, coquettish, and slaves to fashion.‡ Like Mercier, he highlighted a view of aging that focused on what a woman had to lose as she aged: social power, beauty, and self-respect. This essay focuses on the second option mentioned by Mercier, submitting to old age, to explore how aging gracefully may have o∑ered advantages to women through two case studies: the salonnière MarieThérèse Geo∑rin, and Marie Leszczyn´ska, Queen of France and wife of Louis XV. Both women were public figures in French society. And although they had very di∑erent stations—Leszczyn´ska was at the pinnacle of eighteenth-century hierarchy, Geo∑rin was from decidedly non-noble, bourgeois stock—they both demonstrated a noticeable and similar shift in the way they appeared in portraits in their forties, precisely the moment to which Mercier draws our attention.° The relationship between portraiture and actual physical likeness is complicated, particularly when it comes to judging a sitter’s age. This was no less troublesome in the eighteenth century, when portraitists were accused of disregarding truth in the interest of women’s vanity and the artist’s wallet.· While some portraits make manifest physical signs of aging, including wrinkles, sagging skin, or double chins, such aspects of a sitter’s physiognomy could be and were easily hidden by the painter’s brush. My concern is aging as a cultural construction of respectability, rather than a biological process marked by physical 112

growing old in public changes. Here, I consider how the performance of old age by Geo∑rin and Leszczyn´ska in their portraits represented a renunciation of the sex appeal, seduction, and fertility that were key aspects of their public image, commented upon during their lifetime, that served to set them apart from other women—for Geo∑rin, from her fellow salonnières, and for Leszczyn´ska, from her husband’s long-standing mistress, Madame de Pompadour. Marie-Thérèse Geo∑rin is best known for her two salons: a literary salon on Wednesday, which began around 1734, and a Monday gathering for artists and amateurs that started in the mid-1740s.⁄‚ Four years after founding her Wednesday salon, in 1738, her portrait was painted by Jean-Marc Nattier. The thirty-nine-year-old Geo∑rin is seen in a landscape, leaning on an open book, and gesturing dramatically toward her right (Figure 5.2).⁄⁄ The costume and iconography are classicizing in style, but do not correspond to that of any of the goddesses or muses that would have been assumed as allegorical personae by many of Nattier’s sitters. As scholars have noted, the portrait is a clear statement about Geo∑rin’s ambitions to become a salonnière. The book on which Geo∑rin leans is Madame de Lambert’s Traité de l’amour et l’amitié, and its inclusion demonstrates Geo∑rin’s appreciation of Lambert’s legacy as both writer and hostess.⁄¤ The reference to Lambert also highlights the filial relationship of the salons. After Lambert’s death in 1733, the attendees of her salon moved to Madame de Tencin’s. When Madame de Tencin died in 1749, her circle followed Geo∑rin, making her Wednesday salon one of the premier gatherings in Paris.⁄‹ In 1742, a mere four years after Nattier painted his portrait, CharlesNicolas Cochin depicted Geo∑rin in a strikingly di∑erent way (Figure 5.3). The modest drawing shows the forty-three-year-old Geo∑rin playing cards in a bonnet, known as a marmotte, with a coi∑e, or kerchief, tied under her chin. If Nattier’s portrait represents “a woman whom time has not yet a∑ected,” as Xavier Salmon has remarked, in Cochin’s portrait, time has caught up with Geo∑rin.⁄› She seems almost completely enveloped in fabric; only the profile of her face, and her fingers, exposed by fingerless gloves, peek out from yards of silk, fur, and lace. The shift from allegory to genre is significant: the Nattier painting presents Geo∑rin as someone aspiring to be a salonnière, but Cochin’s genrestyle drawing shows her as one. The allegorical portrait necessarily required a fancy dress not present in Cochin’s genre-esque image, but the role of dress in the performance of the self, especially in portraiture, 113

Figure 5.2. Jean-Marc Nattier, Madame Geo∑rin, 1738.

Figure 5.3. Gilles Demarteau after Charles Nicolas II Cochin, portrait of Madame Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geo∑rin, 1770

jessica l. fripp cannot be overstated.⁄fi Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell notes that women of all ages were subject to fashion trends, but there were “unwritten” rules that applied to women above the age of thirty.⁄fl The risk women took if they broke those rules is aptly highlighted in Coypel’s pastel, which makes an elderly woman trying to keep up with fashion trends meant for younger women the object of ridicule. The di∑erent formats also imply di∑erent viewing practices and purposes. One imagines a large-scale portrait would be more easily viewed than a small drawing. While this might suggest a public versus private face of the salonnière, Cochin’s drawing relates to a larger project of medallion portraits of the attendees of Geo∑rin’s salon. These drawings, described as a form of “recreation,” served to document the participants of Geo∑rin’s salon, and had a life beyond the confines of her hôtel particulier; some of them were shown at the biennial Salon of the Royal Academy, and they were later engraved.⁄‡ The public life of these drawings and engravings indicate a self-consciousness about the social importance and the historical interest of the gathering. In this context, Cochin’s portrait of Geo∑rin, which was reproduced in 1770 by Gilles Demarteau, presented the central figure of the salon proceedings as she would have been seen by her salon audience, and, eventually, by a wider public. Furthermore, written commentary about Geo∑rin suggests that she was known for the aged appearance she adopted in her portraits. The Correspondance littéraire claimed in 1776: “All women dress like yesterday, only Geo∑rin always dresses like the day after tomorrow.”⁄° Painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun recalled meeting the salonnière for the first time: “Although she was not very old then, I should have thought her at least a hundred, for not only did she stoop a great deal, but her costume aged her immensely. She wore an iron-grey dress, with a large flapped cap, covered with a black coi∑e tied under her chin. At her age, women nowadays contrive to make themselves look younger by the care they take about their dress.”⁄· From the chronology of Vigée-Lebrun’s Souvenirs, which were published in the 1830s, her first encounter with Geo∑rin likely happened around 1770, at which point, contrary to the claim that Geo∑rin “was not very old,” she was actually quite aged, about seventy. These comments highlight how her choice of dress, rather than her physiognomy, emphasized her age. The surprise in this commentary, as well as that of the Correspondance litteraire, reinforces the idea that the salonnière’s acceptance of her age was unexpected, as if 116

growing old in public people anticipated encountering an old woman like that which Coypel depicted, futilely fighting the e∑ects of time. The image of Geo∑rin that Cochin recorded eclipsed that created by Nattier, which is perhaps why she had her portrait painted again in 1747 by Pierre Allais, in a similar, if not the same, fur-lined silk cape, her elderly dress accompanied by a physiognomy more appropriate for a woman approaching fifty (Figure 5.4).¤‚ In 1766, she was portrayed by the French pastellist Louis Marteau, sporting the now familiar bonnet and coi∑e configuration (Muzeum Narodowe Kraków).¤⁄ Over time, this costume became so associated with her that Maurice Hamon has referred to it as vieillesse iconique (iconic old age), and it has led to a number of portraits being labeled “Madame Geo∑rin” despite there being no other evidence for the attribution.¤¤ This elderly look appears to have been cultivated by Geo∑rin intentionally. In the first pages of the Duchesse d’Abrantès’s nineteenthcentury account of Geo∑rin, she quoted the salonnière as explaining: “I wanted to pre-empt an always-di≈cult age. . . . I wanted to make myself an old lady early. When old age truly came, it would find me totally ready.”¤‹ Geo∑rin’s idea to make “old age come early” corresponds to ideas about aging outlined by her predecessor Madame de Lambert. Along with the Traité de l’amour et de l’amitié, referenced in Nattier’s portrait of Geo∑rin, Lambert also wrote a Traité de la vieillesse between 1700 and 1705. Written when she was in her mid-fifties, it was published fourteen years after her death, the same year as Geo∑rin’s portrait by Allais. Ultimately, her ideas are no more heartening than the words Mercier would o∑er at the end of the century, but, as Joan Hinde Stewart notes in her elegant analysis of the text, it is a rare example of advice about how to deal with old age by a woman who was aging.¤› Lambert was a big proponent of acting one’s age, stating outright that “an admitted old age is less old,” and concluding that “[n]othing is as useless as rebelling against the e∑ects of time; it is stronger than us.”¤fi Most importantly, she had strong opinions about the physical appearance of older women, explaining “in old age one must above all watch oneself, and put dignity in one’s speech and one’s clothes.”¤fl She not only suggested that old women should avoid flashy clothing that would draw undue attention better paid to deserving young women, but she also recommended that old women shouldn’t even be seen: “The theater and public places must be o∑ limits, or at least she should 117

Figure 5.4. Pierre Allais, Madame Geo∑rin, 1747.

growing old in public frequent them rarely: nothing is more indecent than to display a face devoid of charms; when one can no longer adorn those places one must abandon them.”¤‡ Lambert’s emphasis on the way that women decorated (parer) space would have had particular resonance for a salonnière who ran social gatherings and cultivated a highly public image. It is notable that Geo∑rin adopted the elderly look seen in Cochin’s drawing right around the time her salon was gaining popularity. Contrary to Lambert’s advice that old women should disappear from public view, Geo∑rin’s celebrity and that of her salon only increased as she aged. Her reputation as a salonnière was secured, as Antoine Lilti has shown, through an ambitious campaign of self-promotion, cultivating ties with both men of letters and artists, as well as aristocrats and members of European courts.¤° She began collecting art in 1750, and several of her works were displayed at the Salon exhibition, where critics directly mentioned or alluded to her patronage, adding to her fame.¤· She sealed her celebrity in Paris and throughout Europe in 1766, when, at the age of sixty-six, she embarked on a widely publicized voyage to Poland to visit King Stanislas II August Poniatowski.‹‚ Furthermore, Geo∑rin di∑ered from the woman after whom she modeled her salon. While the salon of her immediate predecessor Madame de Tencin became famous because of the notoriety and social status of its host, Geo∑rin became famous because of her salons.‹⁄ Lilti has suggested that being of a certain age, or at least acting like it, was a prerequisite for running a salon. A common biographical journey for salonnières was, Lilti claims, passing “de la galantarie à la mondanité ” (from gallantry to worldliness), even if the abandonment of a gallant youth was done more in words than action.‹¤ Tencin was infamous for her political intrigues, the suicide of her lover Charles-Joseph de la Fresnaye, her imprisonment in the Grand Châtelet and the Bastille, and her illegitimate son Jean le Rond d’Alembert.‹‹ Unlike her noble predecessors, Geo∑rin was not socially positioned to bounce back from the type of scandals that added to Tencin’s celebrity. Geo∑rin’s sartorial choices, and her cultivation of a reputation of acting older than her years, would have demonstrated her renunciation of such youthful shenanigans. We find another example of a woman using aging as an opportunity to craft a new image of herself in the most public woman in ancien régime society: Marie Leszczyn´ska. Her o≈cial court portrait by Carle Van Loo from 1747 falls entirely within the boundaries of the genre 119

jessica l. fripp (Figure 5.5). Surrounded by objects that speak to her position as royal consort, she is presented to the viewer in an exquisite habit de cour of shimmering white silk, gold and silver embroidery, and wide panniers. The painting highlights her place as the king’s first subject, and as the vessel through which the Bourbon line would continue.‹› By Salic law, she did not have the power to rule, but rather served to create the male bodies that would. As such, she is presented in this portrait as a decorative object on display. She appears as immobile as the highly ornamented table next to her, the embroidery of her dress echoing its rococo curves. In 1748, Leszczyn´ska commissioned a portrait that demonstrated a shift in her public image, like Geo∑rin had shortly before. Nattier depicted the forty-five-year-old queen without the trappings of royalty so prominently displayed in her o≈cial court portrait (Figure 5.6). He removed her from the expansive room filled with a large column, table, and fauteuil (armchair), and eliminated the Baroque view onto lush vegetation and a dramatically clouded sky. Instead, we find the queen in an enclosed interior space; behind the green curtain, we see a fluted pilaster and a wall. Although she is dressed in a superb red velvet dress trimmed in black fur and lace, the only suggestion of her station is the barely visible fleur-de-lys upholstery on the chair upon which she sits. Nattier eschews the rigid formality created by panniers and shimmering fabrics through close attention to organic folds of red velvet that envelop the queen’s body. The portrait successfully walks the fine line laid out by Madame de Lambert in its display of a woman who is past the point of being able to fulfill her role as “decoration,” yet does not have the luxury of disappearing from the public sphere as Lambert recommended. She is more decorous than decorative, an idea emphasized by her activity: reading Scripture. Jennifer Germann has convincingly argued that Nattier’s portrait was an important “(re)fashioning” of the queen on her own terms as a pious woman and intellectual, and should be read as “an emphatically public image.”‹fi Indeed, the portrait, which was the queen’s favorite, had a very public life and was disseminated by her: it was displayed at the Salon, copies were given as gifts, and the portrait was engraved.‹fl Thus, it is particularly important to note that the costume and demeanor depicted in this portrait were explicitly the queen’s choice. According to the artist’s daughter, Marie-Catherine Tocqué, Leszczyn´ska specifically requested to be represented in “habit de ville,” or “bourgeois” dress.‹‡ 120

Figure 5.5. Carle Van Loo, Marie Leszczyn´ska, 1747.

Figure 5.6. Jean-Marc Nattier, Marie Leszczyn´ska, 1748.

growing old in public Suggestively, Colin Jones has compared the painting to Jacques-AndréJoseph Aved’s 1741 portrait of Madame Crozat (Montpellier: Musée Fabre)—a portrait once identified as Geo∑rin—calling attention to the similarities of the portraits in regards to their representations of the “bourgeois devote.”‹° The similarities between Allais’s portrait of the “bourgeois” Geo∑rin, and Nattier’s portrait of the queen are even more striking. They are almost mirror images of another in composition: with the swath of fabric, the lack of ostentatious furniture, and the architectural detail of the pilasters in the background. That Leszczyn´ska appears cordoned o∑ from court life at Versailles lends the image an air of more “common” domestic—even private—life, rather than being a courtly performance of her station. Along with notions of city rather than court life, greater emphasis should be placed on what this portrait says about the queen’s performance of age through dress. She wears a bonnet and coi∑e, accessories that were central to Geo∑rin’s performance of old age, and that appear in a number of images of older women that date to the middle of the eighteenth century, as seen in Madame Crozat’s portrait.‹· The queen’s choice of cap elicited commentary similar to that on Geo∑rin’s clothing. Giacomo Casanova claimed in his memoires that the queen appeared “without rouge, in a large bonnet, looking old and pious.”›‚ The emphasis here is, again, not that queen was old, but rather that she appeared old, and like Geo∑rin, her head covering seems to have emphasized this aspect of her appearance. Paula Radisich notes that the black head covering we see in portraits of older women was associated with widows or other women who reject the pleasure of society.›⁄ The adoption of the coi∑e and bonnet by Geo∑rin and the queen might be read then as a fashion of renunciation: a voluntary, but stylish statement that the wearer is distancing herself from associations of youth and desirability. As queen, Leszczyn´ska was not threatened by rumors of impropriety that Lambert believed threatened older public women, especially the salonnières. But there was another woman against whom recent scholars have contrasted the queen and her acceptance of aging: the king’s mistress, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour. Much attention has been paid to the ways Pompadour employed di∑erent forms of portraiture to maintain her place at court in the face of her platonic relationship with the king and ill health.›¤ One focus in the scholarship has been her self-fashioning as a stylish and young 123

jessica l. fripp femme savante. Nattier’s portrait of Leszczyn´ska is often brought into these discussions successfully as a foil or, even more intriguingly, as source material for the mistress’s late portraits, as in the case of François-Hubert Drouais’s 1763–64 portrait of Pompadour at her tambour frame (London: The National Gallery).›‹ As Jones notes, the queen’s portrait by Nattier demonstrates an extraordinarily di∑erent employment of the artist’s talent when it is viewed against his portrait of Madame de Pompadour as Diana (1746; Château of Versailles). He reads the queen’s portrait as a “quiet rejection of values represented by the advent of Pompadour” and a demonstration of her commitment to the king’s spiritual well-being.›› Such discussions highlight the lasting legacy of the queen’s public performance of age in relation to Pompadour, which has been described with rhetoric that associates the renunciation of youth with virtue. The nineteenth-century court biographer Arthur-Léon Imbert de SaintArmand, for one, claimed: “While the guilty mistress watched her youth flee with so much rancor and dread, the virtuous wife experienced neither pain nor regret in aging. It is the privilege of the honest woman to accept without complaint the law of our communal destiny, and to not try an absurd battle against nature, in the hopes of fixing the irreparable assault of the years.”›fi This comment is an oversimplified comparison that pits an aging pious queen who stayed out of state a∑airs against the ambitious, political mistress who managed to stay at court, even as she grew older. Germann has convincingly argued that Nattier’s portrait of the queen was more of a response to Pompadour’s rising power than has been previously acknowledged: it was commissioned at an intense moment of factional court politics, the same year as the anti-Pompadour Poissonades appeared, and Leszczyn´ska’s choice of recipients for the autographed copies was potentially politically loaded.›fl Saint-Armand’s comments are worth highlighting in this context because they emphasize the continued correlation between aging and propriety that was noted in the eighteenth century. All of these were factors that would have helped the queen’s portrait to be an e∑ective, and appropriately subtle, riposte to Pompadour. Given Leszczyn´ska’s decision to embrace virtue over vanity by adopting age-appropriate dress, it is perhaps not coincidental that Coypel’s La Folie pare la décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse is connected to her circle. It refers to a play by Coypel, La Triomphe de la Raison, which was commissioned in 1730 for her by Mademoiselle de 124

growing old in public Clermont, and performed in the gardens of Versailles. The subject of the pastel comes from Act Two, Scene One, one of several scenes that take as its theme the unreasonable vanity of women.›‡ Esther Bell notes that Coypel’s translation of his theatrical work to his painting practice suggests that the private space of the queen’s theater provided a forum for testing ideas that could be eventually disseminated publicly.›° If, as Bell suggests, Coypel’s representation of this scene signaled the queen’s acceptance of humorous satire about old women, then her decision to publicize her own acceptance of her age via the Nattier portrait should be viewed in line with these attitudes. Leszczyn´ska may have had other reasons to gracefully and publicly move into old age, and promote the idea that she was past the age of fecundity. In 1737, after the birth of her tenth child in as many years, Louis XV and the queen ceased conjugal relations. She was, at that point, only thirty-four and conceivably could have continued to add to the royal family. While the Nattier portrait dates to ten years after her transition into a sort of voluntary menopause, it may have served as a highly visible reminder of her virtuous move into old age, promoting her decision to dedicate her post-childbearing years to religious contemplation. This solitude proved fruitful in other ways. The queen had a lifelong interest in painting, but the 1740s and 1750s were a particularly rich period for her own artistic practice.›· In 1746 and 1747, portions of her private apartments in the Palace of Versailles were renovated, creating what was known as the queen’s laboratory where, according to the architect Jacques-François Blondel, she “occupie[d] her leisure with the study of Painting.”fi‚ Freed from the constraints of enduring a continuous cycle of pregnancy and childbirth, she spent time copying works, hand coloring prints, and assisting with the paintings that decorated her cabinet des chinois.fi⁄ Sometime around 1750, Coypel aimed his humor at women who, like Geo∑rin and Leszczyn´ska, chose to embrace the inevitable. He created what Thierry Lefrançois has called a pendant to La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse, entitled La Jeunesse sous les habillements de la Décrépitude (Figure 5.7).fi¤ Removed from the table à toilette, cluttered with its gilded mirror, powder box, and pot of rouge, the female figure is enveloped in a niche-like wicker chair, plainly displaying the accoutrements of old age, including eyeglasses and a cane, for all to see. Notably, her “clothing of decrepitude” is the now-familiar costume of an old woman, the cap with coi∑e. 125

Figure 5.7. Élisabeth Lépicié after Charles Coypel, La Jeunesse sous les habillements de la Décrépitude, c. 1750.

growing old in public Youth is not disguised as old age; the word sous in the painting’s title suggests an idea of submission, a counterpoint to the vain old woman’s unwise determination to “embellish” herself. The anonymous author of the Catalogue de l’œuvre gravé de et d’après Ch Coypel informs us that the work is a portrait of Coypel’s sister-in-law, Marie-Catherine Botet, who was around forty when the work was painted. According to the same author: “To trick this young and beautiful wife with a silly joke, after recording her features, [Coypel] dressed her as an old woman, seated in a wicker chair known as a confessional, with her glasses in her hand.”fi‹ Coypel’s joke aimed at his sister-in-law aligns with Mercier’s claim that the forty-year-old woman has a choice to try to maintain her looks or submit to the inevitable. That Botet maintains her youthful features in Coypel’s depiction suggests that submitting sartorially to old age was the better of the two options, an idea similarly highlighted in Geo∑rin’s and Leszczyn´ska’s choice of dress in their portraits. Geo∑rin’s and the queen’s decisions to take control of their aging also draw our attention to an oversight in the scholarship on the representation of gender in eighteenth-century visual culture. Historian David Troyansky has claimed that a survey of French painting of the eighteenth century suggests that “artists discovered old age at midcentury,” which coincided with an increase in the life span of the French population.fi› Yet, his investigation of the appearance of the elderly in the visual arts of the period is not exhaustive, and largely neglects images of women. This generalization of the supposed “discovery” of old age based on visual evidence correlates with how art historians have discussed gender roles in ageist terms in eighteenth-century visual culture in the last few decades. The pater familias in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Filial Piety (1763; St Petersburg: Hermitage State Museum) finds his counterpart in the image of the fertile and good mother in Greuze’s The Well-Loved Mother (1769; private collection).fifi In the former, the old man is the focus of attention, revered by all. Even on his deathbed, the father maintains his central role in the family and, by extension, in society. In the latter, the young mother is a bright spot in an otherwise earth-toned scene, and her celebrated status is directly linked to the abundance of o∑spring that swarm her. In both works, the older women are subordinate details. In Filial Piety, she sits at the far left, physically distanced from her children, grandchildren, and husband; in the Well-Loved Mother, her presence is little more than a brief obstacle in the direct line connecting the father’s exuberant entrance to his wife’s maternal ecstasy. 127

jessica l. fripp Trying to make sense of Geo∑rin’s and the queen’s decisions to publicly embrace a type of womanhood that appears to have been neglected or marginalized in narrative painting is the first step to considering the roles women played in the cultural landscape of the eighteenth century as they aged. Their portraits, and the numerous portraits of older women in museum collections, suggest that these women did not simply disappear. Portraiture was not just the game of young, vain women, or a form of flattery, as eighteenth-century critics claimed. Aging, and demonstrating that one accepted aging, provided an opportunity for (re)fashioning at a moment of transition in women’s lives. For Marie-Thérèse Geo∑rin, old age allowed her to increase her celebrity while maintaining her propriety. Marie Leszczyn´ska used aging as a means to withdraw from her very public life as queen. In both cases, choosing to “let old age find them ready” provided them with space to cultivate new roles for themselves.fifl

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The author would like to thank Jennifer Milam, Jennifer Germann, and Melissa Hyde for their comments on this essay, and Charles Changduk Kang for archival assistance in Paris. “Il est une situation cruelle, embarrassante pour une femme que a excité longtems les désirs des hommes et la jalousie de son sexe; c’est le moment où son miroir lui dit: vous n’êtes plus charmante comme autrefois; vous avez beau être indulgents à vous-même, votre beauté s’e∑ace; et quoique l’éclipse de vos attraits soit imperceptible, elle n’en est pas moins réelle.” Louis-Sébastien Mercier, “Femmes de quarante ans” in Tableau de Paris (Amsterdam, 1783), 6:258. “elle sent qu’elle perd son existence.” Ibid., 259 “le ministre ambitieux qui se trouve tout-à-coup dépossédé du pouvoir dont il étoit si fier et si jaloux.” Ibid. “Au reste, une femme à Paris n’a jamais quarante ans; elle en a toujours trente ou soixante; et comme personne ne dit le contraire, la femme quadragénaire n’existe pas.” Ibid., 262. Joan Hinde Stewart, The Enlightenment of Age: Women, Letters and Growing Old in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2010), 62. See ibid., 33–68, for the best overview of attitudes toward and ideas about menopause in eighteenth-century France. On women and fashion, see Jennifer Jones, Sexing la Mode: Gender, Fashion and Commerce in Old Regime France (New York: Berg, 2004), and Clare Haru Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). It should be noted that the two women discussed in this essay were women of privilege. As Margaret Hunt notes, old age was incredibly hard for women (and men) without social status. The elderly often worked until death, and

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could be turned out of their homes by families with scant resources. The discussion of Geo∑rin’s and Leszczyn´ska’s adoption of old age should be seen as particular to women who were free of the economic constraints felt by the majority of eighteenth-century families. See Margaret Hunt, Longman History of European Women: Women in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Florence: Routledge, 2014), 82–83. See especially the comments made by Étienne La Font de Saint Yenne, Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état present de la Peinture en France (La Haye: Jeane Neaulme, 1747), 25. On Geo∑rin and her salons, see Maurice Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin: femme d’influence, femme d’a∑aires au temps des Lumières (Paris: Fayard, 2010); Charlotte Guichard, Les amateurs d’Art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Editions Champ Vallon, 2008); Antoine Lilti, Le Monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). While the year in which the Wednesday salon was established has been debated, the recent work of Hamon suggests it most likely began in the mid-1740s, and became a regular event in 1750. Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin, 663–66. The whereabouts of the original version of the painting are unknown. The painting held today in the collection of the Fuji Art Museum is an unsigned, undated copy. This was not unusual practice for Nattier, who only signed and dated the first version of his portraits. See Xavier Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier: 1685–1766, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1999), 111–15. Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin, 137; Maison de Chateaubriand, Madame Geo∑rin, une femme d’a∑aires et d’esprit, exh. cat. (Milan: Silvana, 2011), 22. Madame Lambert hosted gatherings on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 1710 until 1733, regarded as one of the most distinguished salons in Paris during the period. Participants in the Tuesday literary gathering were expected to read aloud their own works; Lambert likewise shared with her guests her own writings, which were published, sometimes without her permission. Dena Goodman first argued for the filial relationship of the salonnières in The Republic of Letters, 76. Benedetta Craveri has also treated the continuity of the salon from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century with an eye to the filial relationship between the salonnières in The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005). “[U]ne femme que le temps n’avait pas encore a∑ecté,” Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 111. See, for example, discussions of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s portrait of MarieAntoinette en chemise in Mary Sheri∑, The Exceptional Woman: Élisabeth VıgéeLebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 143–79, and Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Vıctims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 172–99. Amy Freund has highlighted the important role of costume in Revolutionary portraits in “The Legislative Body,” in Portraiture and

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Politics in Revolutionary France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 62–70. Chrisman-Campbell, Fashion Vıctims, 43–46. According to Huges-Adrien Joly, “Madame Geo∑rin donne chez elle un dîné appelé le dîné des Arts, et tandis que les un sont à la conversation, le S. Cochin se recrée à dessiner ou ses confrères ou des amateurs, en sorte que son intention serait de les faire graver tous pour en faire une suite de portraits.” [Madame Geo∑rin held at her place a dinner called the dinner of the Arts and while they conversed, Cochin amused himself by drawing either his colleagues or the amateurs, with the intention of having them all engraved to make a suite of portraits.] Quoted in Guichard, Les amateurs d’art, 220. Some of the portraits were shown at the Salon of 1753, listed in the livret under number 179 as “Quarante-six petits portraits en Médaillons dessinés par M. Cochin le fils.” On these portraits, see ibid., 223–27; Christian Michel, CharlesNicolas Cohin et l’art des lumières (Rome: École de française de Rome, 1993), 121–30; 617–26; Jessica L. Fripp, “Celebrating Celebrity,” in Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2020), 35-71. “Toutes les femmes, se mettent comme la vieille; il n’y a que madame Geo∑rin qui se soit toujours mise comme le lendemain,” March 1776. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique de Grimm et de Diderot (Paris: Furne, 1830), 9:9. “Quoiqu’elle ne fût pas alors très âgée, je lui avais donné cent ans; car, non seulement elle se tenait un peu courbée, mais son costume la vieillissait beaucoup. Elle était vêtue d’une robe grise de fer et portait sur sa tête un bonnet à grand papillon, recouvert d’une coi∑e noire nouée sous le menton. À pareil âge, maintenant, les femmes au contraire réussissent à se rajeunir par le soin qu’elles apportent à leur toilette.” Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Souvenirs (1835; Saint-Didier: L’Escalier, 2010), 1:21. Geo∑rin’s inventory after her death lists nine dresses, almost all grey or black. MC ET CXVII 879, October 15, 1777, Archives Nationales, Paris. This portrait is identified as Geo∑rin and said to have belonged to her in Maison de Chateaubriand, Madame Geo∑rin, 95. This portrait was engraved by Simon Miger in 1779, and became the basis for a number of posthumous images of Geo∑rin. The number of portraits that have been said at one point or another to represent Geo∑rin is too long to list here, but some of the more notable works include a portrait by Marianne Loir in the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., and a portrait in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin said to be by Jean-Baptiste Greuze. The attribution of this painting to Greuze and Geo∑rin was first suggested in Michael Knuth, “Ein Portäit der Madame Geo∑rin von Jean-Baptiste Greuze?” Museums Journal 15, no. 11 (2001): 86–87. “J’ai voulu aller au-devant d’une époque toujours dificile . . . j’ai voulu me faire vieille de bonne heure. Quand la vieillesse viendra véritablement, ell me trouvera toute prête.” Laure Junot, Duchesse d’Abrantès, Une soirée chez madame Geo∑rin (Paris: Librairie de Dumont, 1837), 3. The Duchesse d’Abrantès’s

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account was written well after Geo∑rin’s death in 1777, but she claimed her sources were individuals who had attended the salon themselves. See Stewart, The Enlightenment of Age, 7–19. “Une vieillesse avouée est moins vieille”; “Rien de si inutile que de se révolter contre les e∑ets du tems; il est plus fort que nous.”Œuvres de Madame la Marquise de Lambert, avec un abrégé de sa vie (1748), 2:54, 62. “En vieillissant il faut s’observer sur tout, & mettre dans ses discours et dans ses habits de la décence.” Ibid., 53. “Les spectacles, les lieux publics doivent être interdits; ou du moins il faut y aller rarement: rien de moins décent que d’y montrer un visage sans grâces; dès qu’on ne peut plus parer ces lieux-là, il faut les abandonner.” Ibid., 54–55. See Lilti, Le Monde des salons, 163–68. See the list of works provided in Pierre de Ségur, Le Royaume de la rue SaintHonoré: Mme Geo∑rin et sa fille (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1897), 403–8. Carle Van Loo’s Conversation espagnole and Lecture espagnole and Joseph-Marie Vien’s Four Seasons were among the works owned by Geo∑rin that were displayed at the Salon. See Emma Barker, “Mme Geo∑rin, Painting and Galanterie: Carle Van Loo’s Conversation Espagnole and Lecture Espagnole,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 4 (2007): 587–614, and Thomas Gaehtgens, Joseph-Marie Vıen, peintre du roi (1716–1809) (Paris: Arthena, 1988), cat. nos. 181–84. On Geo∑rin’s travels, see Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin, 442–98. As Lilti notes, this trip was not as successful as the press let on, due to the political situation in Poland, but Geo∑rin e∑ectively used it to augment her celebrity. See Lilti, Le Monde des salons, 164. On this point, see Craveri, The Age of Conversation, 302, and Maurice Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin, 14. Lilti, Le Monde de Salon, 111. He notes Madame de Tencin and the Duchesse de La Vallière are two notable examples of women with “jeunesses galante.” On Tencin, see Craveri, The Age of Conversation, 277–94. Jennifer Germann, Figuring Marie Leszczyn´ska (1703–1768): Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 146. Ibid., 155–87, and Jennifer Germann, “Queen Seduces Mistress: The Portraiture of Marie Leszczyn´ska and Madame de Pompadour,” in Feminism Reframed: Reflections on Art and Di∑erence, ed. Alexandra M. Kolki (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 150. On the replicas and variants of this work, see Salmon, Jean-Marc Nattier, 197–200. Marie-Catherine Tocqué, “Abrége de la vie de M. Nattier,” in Mémoires inédits sur la vie et les ouvrages des membres de l’académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: Dumoulin, 1854), 358. Bourgeois, in this context, should be read as synonymous with roturière (commoner), in other words, non-noble. Colin Jones, Madame de Pompadour: Images of a Mistress (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 47. Germann similarly notes the similarities between the two portraits in Figuring Marie Leszczyn´ska, 176. On Aved’s portrait, see Hamon, Madame Geo∑rin, 151 n23.

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jessica l. fripp 39 Some other notable examples include Louis Tocqué’s presumed portrait of Mme Gra≈gny (1740), and his portrait of Madame Dangé (1753), both in the Musée du Louvre, the Old Woman with a Mu∑ (second half of the eighteenth century, National Gallery of Art), and Alexander Roslin’s Portrait de Madame de Flandre de Brunville (1763, Musée des beaux-arts Tours). 40 Giacomo Casanova, The Story of My Life, trans. Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawks (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 188. 41 Paula Radisich, Pastiche, Fashion, Galanterie in Chardin’s Genre Subjects: Looking Smart (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2013), 80. 42 See Elise Goodman, The Portraits of Madame de Pompadour: Celebrating the Femme Savant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Jones, Madame de Pompadour; Melissa Hyde, “The Makeup of the Marquise,” in Making Up the Rococo: François Boucher and his Critics (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2006), 107–44. As Hyde notes, Pompadour herself claimed her portraits by Boucher were “very pretty, but of little likeness” (112). See also the discussion of JeanBaptiste Pigalle’s “portraits” of Pompadour in the guise of friendship in Katherine K. Gordon, “Madame de Pompadour, Pigalle, and the Iconography of Friendship,” Art Bulletin 50, no. 3 (September 1968): 249–62. 43 Hyde, “The Makeup of the Marquise,” 130; Germann, “Queen Seduces Mistress,” 151–53. 44 Jones, Madame de Pompadour, 47. On this point, see also Germann, Figuring Marie Leszczyn´ska, 168–70. 45 “Tandis que la maîtresse coupable voyait avec tant de dépit, tant d’angoisses sa jeunesse s’envoler, l’épouse vertueuse n’éprouvait ni peine ni regret à vieillir. C’est le privilège des honnêtes femmes d’accepter sans murmure les lois de la destinée commune, et de ne point essayer une lutte folle contra la nature, dans l’espérance de réparer l’irréparable outrage des ans.” Arthur-Léon Imbert de Saint-Amand, Les femmes de Versailles: la cour de Louis XV (Paris: E. Dentu, 1892), 62–63. 46 Germann, Figuring Marie Leszczyn´ska, 164–68. Germann notes the copies were destined for the comte de Maurepas, a longtime supporter of the queen, and Joseph Pâris-Duverney, an old friend who was backing Pompadour. 47 See Esther Bell, “Behind Closed Doors: Charles-Antoine Coypel and le théâter de société,” in Artistes, savants et amateurs: art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle, eds. Jessica L. Fripp, et al. (Paris: Mare et Martin, 2016), 56. 48 Ibid. 49 Xavier Salmon, Parler à l’âme et au coeur: la peinture selon Marie Leszczyn´ska, exh. cat. (Dijon: Éditions Faton, 2011), 20–21. 50 Quoted in Jennifer Germann, “Figuring Marie Leszczyn´ ska (1703–1768): Representing Queenship in Eighteenth-Century France” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2002), 119–20. See also Salmon, Parler à l’âme, 28. 51 In 1753, she copied Jean-Baptiste Oudry’s The Farm, originally commissioned for the Dauphin’s cabinet, and gave her copy to the king as a gift. She often gave her hand-painted prints as gifts. In 1751, these prints were used to redecorate

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her refurbished garde robe. See Salmon, Parler à l’âme, 28–33. In the same exhibition catalogue, Salmon also identifies a group of paintings of saints that the queen painted for the Carmelite convent at Compiègne. See ibid., 118–25. On the cabinet des chinois, see Marguerite Jallut, “Marie Leczinska et la peinture,” Gazette des beaux arts 73 (1969): 309–13; Germann, “Figuring Marie Lesczcinska,” 109–51; Salmon, Parler à l’âme, 88–102. Thierry Lefrançois, Charles Coypel, peintre du roi (1694–1752) (Paris: Arthena, 1994), 369. “Pour tromper par une plaisanterie cette jeune et belle Epouse, après avoir pris ses traits de ressemblance, il l’habilla en vieille, assise dans un fauteuil de paille dit confessional, avec ses lunettes a la main.” Quoted in ibid., 369. David G. Troyansky, Old Age in the Old Regime: Image and Experience in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 27. Carol Duncan, “Happy Mothers and Other New Ideas in French Art,” The Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 570–83. For discussions of the male protagonists in eighteenth-century painting, see Robert Rosenblum, “The Exemplum Vırtutis,” in Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 50–107, and Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). Duchesse d’Abrantès, Une soirée chez madame Geo∑rin, 3.

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Figure 6.1. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe, 1753–76.

chapter 6

French Funerary Monuments of the Ancien Régime as the Product of Individual Artistic Solutions wiebke windorf

I

deas of death and immortality as manifest in funerary monument commissions of the ancien régime were individualistic and idiosyncratic. The monuments served as a forum in which to propose and incubate new ideas about and attitudes toward death and the hereafter. Within the context of royal mausoleums and the broader sca∑olding of ideas of death and immortality, certain edifices reflect this avantgarde thinking. This article considers several of these, their greater relevance to the dynamic of art history and the history of ideas, and suggests further avenues of exploration and inquiry in the future.⁄ The major French funerary monuments of the ancien régime are, first and foremost, highly individual products of artistic solutions and skills. They are not solely visualizations manifesting the “collective” or prevalent attitudes of the time toward death (which has been a foundational argument of the histoire des mentalités), nor are they merely derivative visualizations of enlightened concepts of the philosophes, as some scholars have proposed. This article considers elaborate tombs as objects both of art historical research and of the histoire des mentalités, focusing on one of the most famous sculptures of the eighteenth century: Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe (Figure 6.1). Although commentary in contemporary travel and church guidebooks attests to a clear recognition of the artistic formulation of funerary 135

wiebke windorf monuments, the status of sculptors in the ancien régime was not on par with that of painters.¤ This inequality is evident as early as Denis Diderot’s critique of the Salon and is still reflected today by the large number of scholarly publications on painting and the very few monographs on contemporary eighteenth-century sculptors. There is a similar trend down the centuries in French funerary sculpture, which was reinforced by Erwin Panofsky when in 1964 he declared Gianlorenzo Bernini the last great innovator.‹ Although Louis Réau, François Souchal, and Mary Jackson Harvey provided notable work, these generated no great enthusiasm for further study.› That changed in 2009, when Claire Mazel’s dissertation on seventeenth-century funeral sculpture in Paris broke new ground.fi With further work by Guilhem Scherf, Anne Betty Weinshenker, and Erika Naginski, attention has increasingly and rightly focused on French funeral art and sculpture.fl Yet the number of researchers in this area is still relatively small, and much light remains to be shed on the achievements of the French tomb sculptures in the Age of Enlightenment.‡ The tombs benefited neither from neglect by art historians nor from their use as proof—written in stone, so to speak—of extant collective conceptions of death, especially by historians who were interested in the histoire des mentalités from the 1960s onward.° In my view, the relation between collective attitudes on death of that time (which Philippe Ariès, one of the leading historians of the histoire des mentalités, has taken to have been the same throughout France) and the conceptions of funerary monuments was seen too narrowly by some scholars of the histoire des mentalités.· The particular conditions underpinning the creation of a funerary monument do not permit us to infer any expression of collective ideas on death and the afterlife. In the eighteenth century, the groups involved in creating complex tombs (including artists, thinkers, and patrons) were too elitist, too small, and too heterogeneous to allow us to extrapolate conclusions about the French population as a whole. Also, the production of these tombs was often a complex process incorporating the explicit wishes of the deceased, the family, the sponsor, intellectual consultants, or all of the above, as well as the iconographic and stylistic ideas of the artist. The tomb necessarily reflected variations in function, form, content, size, and siting—all as a result of a highly individual interplay between the di∑erent parameters and parties involved in a commission. There are no easy conclusions to be drawn. 136

french funerary monuments Another crucial argument of the historiens des mentalités when considering the tombs and their iconographic conceptions calls for further investigation. Ariès and Michel Vovelle held that enlightened ideas of contemporary philosophers had only a slight influence on people’s everyday religious behavior and their outlook on death and the afterlife.⁄‚ However, it is inherently contradictory to understand tombs as visualizations of collective attitudes toward death on the one hand and on the other to argue that ideas of the Enlightenment had only a minor influence. Some philosophers were directly involved in the creative process—Diderot with the tomb of the Dauphin and Dauphine, for example.⁄⁄ While we know that many artists were familiar with the ideas of philosophers and art critics on certain themes, the extent to which any artwork was actually influenced remains conjecture and must be considered on a case-by-case basis.⁄¤ Just as funerary monuments should not be used by the historiens des mentalités as visual evidence of a collective conception of death, by that same token, they should not be treated merely as illustrations of philosophical and religious criticism. Instead, these objects should be understood as products of artistic invention that stand as uniquely individual approaches, notwithstanding conceptual and iconographic preconditions. They are not post hoc visual evidence of a discourse but, rather, an integral part of a process that generates that very discourse. This understanding makes possible the individual genesis of an artwork while at the same time linking single works meaningfully to one another through a higher level of inquiry. The elemental discussion about the form and the function of the funerary monument leads us to consider the following example. In 1753, a tomb was commissioned to honor Maurice, Count of Saxony, Marshal of France, celebrating his victory at Fontenoy during the War of the Austrian Succession. This elaborate tomb, completed in 1776, is the most famous of the three royal tomb projects of the eighteenth century.⁄‹ An earlier competition, in 1743, for the Funerary Monument to the Cardinal de Fleury, was won by Edmé Bouchardon, but the work was never completed.⁄› The third commission under Louis XV was awarded in 1766 to Guillaume Coustou the Younger for the Funerary Monument to the Dauphin and the Dauphine, which was erected in the choir of the Cathedral Saint-Étienne in Sens.⁄fi From the draft concepts submitted for the Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe, the king finally decided on one of two by Pigalle. 137

Figure 6.2. Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe (detail), 1753–76.

french funerary monuments The chosen design formed the basis of the monument that can still be seen today in the choir apse against the backdrop of the Gothic windows of the Protestant Church of Saint-Thomas in Strasbourg (Figure 6.2).⁄fl Under a soaring obelisk, the Marshal of Saxony, clad in full military regalia and holding the commander’s sta∑, descends the steps of a tomb to a sarcophagus held open by a grinning skeleton. A female figure in a robe embroidered with lilies crouches on the step between the marshal and the skeleton. Her right hand touches the marshal’s lower arm, while her left hand reaches toward the skeleton with outstretched fingers. At the marshal’s feet, animals tumble to the ground, scattering outward. Below and to the left of the sarcophagus, a powerful male figure, covered only in a lion’s skin, leans against his cudgel. The emblem below the sarcophagus and the inscription on the obelisk proclaim the Marshal of Saxony. The descriptions and interpretations included in the artist’s various sketches and mémoires, submitted as part of contract negotiations, provide us concrete details of how Pigalle wanted his artwork understood. The marshal was to be shown in a majestic pose, one befitting a commander in the service of France. The animals’ flight represents the conquest of defeated nations. At the pinnacle of the marshal’s fame, the skeleton representing Death shows him a shroud, readying him for the open sarcophagus.⁄‡ The personification of France grieves the loss of her general. Representing valor, the Gallic Hercules on the left side of the sarcophagus evinces dismay.⁄° All these elements draw on a long sepulchral tradition. Pigalle, however, modified and arranged these components to establish a completely new conception of a tomb, one di∑ering greatly in both form and content from earlier examples. Pigalle’s innovation is an important part of a fundamental debate on the function and validity of a mausoleum in the eighteenth century. A related analysis of form is noted here only briefly.⁄· The obelisk was introduced into tomb sculpture with Raphael’s Chigi Chapel and became a common feature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Figure 6.3). In Pigalle’s work, it is not merely a flat, closed-o∑ architectural element; rather, it becomes the crucial mediator between the lower compressed and agitated area of the monument, the standing figure of the marshal, and the high Gothic windows of the choir. The paraphrased pyramidal structure of the obelisk gives the vertical stability necessary for the monument’s overall statement. 139

Figure 6.3. Michel-Ange Slodtz, Funerary Monument to the Archbishops Armand de Montmorin and Henri-Oswald de la Tour d’Auvergne, 1740–43, 1747 in situ.

french funerary monuments Like the obelisk, the freestanding figure is a prominent element in military monuments inside churches; there are numerous Venetian examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The erect statue with a sarcophagus below can be seen up to Pigalle’s time north of the Alps as well (Figures 6.4–6.6). Though it is perfectly justifiable to draw parallels with non-sacred memorial statues, especially in terms of form, such a figural tradition had existed for several centuries in military funeral sculpture (Figure 6.7). Referencing the military grave, Pigalle’s concept stands in stark contrast to the seventeenth-century Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Turenne. The sculptor transformed the pure standing figure into a forward-stepping motif embedded in a scène dramatique.¤‚ Starting with Bernini’s Funerary Monument to Pope Urban VIII, supporting figures moved from playing passive, attributive roles to becoming a tomb’s personnel/cast of characters. This sees its highest expression in Pigalle’s dramatic staging of France in the Funerary Monument to the Marshal of Saxony, who, in her gesture at once deflecting and grieving, despairs at the inescapability of death. In addition to the classical supporting figures, Bernini also adapted the figure of Death for his funerary sculpture. Ever since, Death has forsaken a purely decorative character in favor of an active participation that, consequently and appositely, reaches even into the sphere of the dead or dying. One example of a representation of direct confrontation between man and Death is the Monument to the Families Keurlinckx/van Delft in Antwerp (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal, 1688) by Peter Scheemaeckers the Elder, from a famous family of artists with workshops throughout Europe.¤⁄ In this example, the male figure turns away from the personification of Death, which reaches for him with an outstretched arm, as if in an attempt to escape. In comparison with this earlier work, Pigalle’s Marshal of Saxony does not struggle but accepts his fate. The sculptor’s crucial innovation was to combine the tradition of portraying Death with an erect skeleton opening or holding open the lid of a sarcophagus. In the Bernini-influenced example of Domenico Guidi in Rome, the skeleton is a personification of Death overcome—an icon of resurrection (Figure 6.8). As a rule, a pendant, such as the personification of a Christian virtue or an angel, would appear opposite Death. These two elements—the open sarcophagus and the counterbalancing figure— render the temporal aspect of death overcome and disempowered. 141

Figure 6.4. Gianlorenzo Bernini, Funerary Monument to the Countess Matilda of Canossa, 1633–37.

Figure 6.5. William Kent and Michael Rysbrack, Funerary Monument to the First Duke of Marlborough, 1736.

Figure 6.6. Johann Schütz and Thomas Heilmann, Funerary Monument to the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden-Baden, 1751–53.

Figure 6.7. Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne the Younger, Monument to Louis XV for Rennes, c. 1748.

Figure 6.8. Domenico Guidi, Funerary Monument to the Cardinal Lorenzo Imperiali, 1674.

french funerary monuments However, Pigalle dramatized the imminent death of the marshal through a descent into the sarcophagus. Instead of the angel, the iconic personification of heaven-sent immortality, what remains are the military troops in the figure of Hercules and the figure of France to lament the marshal’s earthly demise and commemorate, along with the vanquished animals, the extraordinary and commendable earthly deeds of the marshal. Through these components, Pigalle fulfilled the intention of the tomb, clearly outlined in a 1752 letter from the Marquis de Prohengues (the marshal’s executor, who had to be informed about the proceedings concerning the commission) to Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, directeur général des bâtiments du Roi,¤¤ who was the most important person in the royal administration with regard to o≈cial art policy: “I would be neither too careful nor too insistent for a friend, a hero, who has served the King so well and who deserves a sign of recognition that shows posterity the service he has rendered the nation.”¤‹ Archival documents confirm that Pigalle himself envisioned the staging: “The pyramid expresses the immortality to which his virtues will elevate him.”¤› By recasting elements familiar in sepulchral sculpture, the artist rejected the Christian hope of an afterworld and, at the same time, proclaimed the certainty of a new and this-worldly immortality for the marshal—in the memory of the people. It became accordingly clear that Pigalle, with this radical form, had also spearheaded a revision of the funeral monument in theme and content. His focus on grieving posterity (embodied in the lamenting France and Hercules, for example) and the posthumous and earthly fame of the great man, in combination with an open sarcophagus signifying his definitive physical, worldly end, is without precedent in the history of art. The notion of honoring the illustrious in funerary monuments was by no means new. Leon Battista Alberti held that the state had honored the worthy by erecting funeral monuments, even in antiquity.¤fi In 1688, François Lemée in his Traité des statues cited the custom of erecting magnificent mausoleums in Saint-Denis in recognition of grands personnages to comfort the populace.¤fl As for relevant contemporary dictionaries on architecture and encyclopedias, the first definition of “monument” that explicitly commemorates hommes illustres—individuals commendable for talent and deeds furthering the common good— appeared in the Dictionnaire abregé of François-Marie de Marsy in 1746.¤‡ In encyclopedic entries, the funerary monument was understood 147

Figure 6.9. James Gibbs and Michael Rysbrack, Funerary Monument to Matthew Prior, 1723.

french funerary monuments as a subcategory of the monument used to honor specific persons at their burial site. The new focus on hommes illustres was also evident in other contexts. Voltaire admiringly described the tradition at Westminster Abbey of honoring poets and other intellectual heroes (Figure 6.9). This tradition was also reflected in Evrard Titon du Tillet’s e∑orts to pay tribute to such persons by building a monument.¤° In the late eighteenth century, there was an increase in initiatives to pay collective tribute to great persons. The principal example is, pars pro toto, the series of grands hommes commissioned by Charles Claude Flahaut de la Billarderie, Comte d’Angiviller, the directeur général des bâtiments du Roi, for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre between 1777 until 1789. However, the statues were never brought together in a group.¤· The basic feature common to all these impulses was the honoring of deeds performed for the common good regardless of social class and, later, of an individual’s exemplary virtue. Pigalle’s commission came in 1753, two decades before the series honoring the great men. In 1756, he exhibited his scale model, including the life-sized marshal, to the Parisian public. For the first time in the history of monumental tombs, Pigalle visualized the act of becoming immortal, giving the tomb a new mandate. He gave the impetus to the growing tradition of honoring and valorizing great men and deeds. In contrast to countless earlier military examples, the apotheosis of the deceased no longer stands in the foreground in his work, and in contrast to religious monuments, there is no angelic summons to the afterlife. Pigalle’s sculpture is an exemplification of a this-worldly immortality achieved through the concrete portrayal of dying. With the fearless descent into an open sarcophagus as the depiction of a definitive earthly physical end, Pigalle portrayed an idea of immortality (and ultimately of morality) beyond religion. Physical death is at once one’s definitive earthly end and the birth of their posthumous fame and immortality. For that reason, the great need not fear the physical end. In Pigalle’s original concept, the marshal’s upper body was turned slightly toward the defeated animals (a pose reflective of Attila’s in Alessandro Algardi’s famous relief in Saint Peter’s Basilica), but this was replaced later by a more frontal portrayal (Figure 6.10).‹‚ However, this does not detract from the innovation communicated by the procession toward the open grave and the reference to the marshal’s worldly deeds. 149

Figure 6.10. Alessandro Algardi, The Meeting between St. Leo the Great and Attila, 1646–53.

french funerary monuments With the original orientation of the upper body toward the defeated animals as symbols of military success, Pigalle focused the spectator’s eye even more squarely on the marshal’s extraordinary achievements, further underscoring the reasons for erecting the monument. This specific idea of immortality underlies monuments to great men. Ten years after the completion of the tomb’s model, Diderot addressed these lines to sculptor Étienne-Maurice Falconet, in which we can recognize Pigalle’s notion of posthumous fame: “The esteem of posterity is the sole good that the Great can achieve only by an almighty e∑ort; and the only thing of which they must be insatiable [ . . . ]. This immortality or the hope to live on in people’s memory is all that consoles us for the brevity of life. Death is only frightening to those who see that with life all is extinguished, but not to those whose fame cannot grow dim.”‹⁄ It is hardly surprising that Pigalle wanted his monument placed at a more prominent, non-ecclesiastical site than Strasbourg. In the 1770s, Pigalle pled for the monument to remain in Paris, making a strong case based on, above all, the monument’s function of visualizing the immortality of the marshal attained through his merit. Pigalle argued that a monumental veneration could therefore be created regardless of the marshal’s religious a≈liation and placed in a context more befitting of its content, for example, in the École de militaire.‹¤ Yet the marshal’s Protestant faith,‹‹ the unwieldy size of the artwork, the reconstruction work already completed in Strasbourg, and the marshal’s existing grave there all mitigated against this. By virtue of his revolutionary concept in the 1750s, Pigalle took active part in a discourse on religion, morality, this- and other-worldliness, fame, and immortality—ideas newly entertained and discussed in the elite philosophical circles around Voltaire, Diderot, and others. Pigalle demonstrated that the production of art need not be merely a reiteration of philosophical tenets; the artist had become an active player in the intellectual discourse. It is ironic that Pigalle conceived the essentials of this discourse within the constraints of a royal commission. The debate surrounding an appropriate site for his work also makes clear that Pigalle had given profound consideration to all the tasks of a funerary monument. In a departure from the artists of previous historical examples of memorials to illustrious persons, Pigalle proposed contemporary new ideas of death and immortality by setting in stone the act of dying. By reformulating the funerary vocabulary and transcending its Christian content, Pigalle’s monument at once forms the 151

wiebke windorf high point of the Baroque with its multi-figured layout and paves the way for honoring great men within a secular framework. French funerary monuments of the eighteenth century as aspects of art and intellectual history are well worth deeper investigation. Just as they should not be used as visual evidence of a collective conception of death, they should also not be treated merely as illustrations of philosophical and religious criticism. The example of Pigalle’s Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe shows that the monument should be understood as a product of artistic invention that proclaims contemporary ideas on death and immortality, notwithstanding conceptual and iconographic preconditions. Nevertheless, funerary monuments are not an illustrative repetition of a discourse but, rather, an integral part of a process that generate that very discourse. Some tombs reflect and promulgate a unique turning point in the history of ideas about death, religion, and morality. These monuments are the unique reification of important tenets in the social and political life of the nation— ideas truly made visible. 001 This article reflects some ideas and arguments presented in my habilitation theses entitled Death, Immortality and the Enlightenment: The Royal Funerary Monuments as a Site of Innovation and Discourse under Louis XV (1715–1774) (Paris: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, forthcoming). 002 Anne Betty Weinshenker, A God or a Bench: Sculpture as a Problematic Art during the Ancien Régime (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 24–25, with a list of other scholars who share her opinion. See also Wiebke Windorf, “Aktueller Forschungsbericht zur französischen Skulptur der Aufklärung im Rahmen einer Rezension zu Eva Hausdorf: Monumente der Aufklärung. Die Grab- und Denkmäler von JeanBaptiste Pigalle, 1714–1785, zwischen Konvention und Erneuerung, Berlin 2012,” Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen 267, no. 1–2 (2015): 76–91. 003 Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. Horst W. Janson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1964), 96. 004 Louis Réau, Étienne-Maurice Falconet, 2 vols. (Paris: Demotte, 1922); Louis Réau, Les Lemoyne: Une dynastie de sculpteurs au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: les Beaux-Arts, Éd. d’études et de documents, 1927); Louis Réau, J.-B. Pigalle (Paris: Pierre Tisné, 1950); Louis Réau, Houdon: Sa vie et son œuvre. Ouvrage posthume suivi d’un catalogue systématique, 2 vols. (Paris: de Nobele, 1964); François Souchal, Les Slodtz: Sculpteurs et décorateurs du Roi, 1685–1764 (Paris: Boccard, 1967); François Souchal, French Sculptors of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Oxford: Cassirer, 1977/1981/1987); François Souchal, Les frères Coustou: Nicolas (1658–1733), Guillaume (1677–1746), et l’évolution de la sculpture française du Dôme des Invalides aux chevaux de Marly (Paris: Boccard,

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1980); Mary Jackson Harvey, “French Baroque Tomb Sculpture: The Activation of the E≈gy” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1987). See also Michael Levey, Painting and Sculpture in France 1700–1789 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Claire Mazel, La mort et l’éclat: Monuments funéraires parisien du Grand Siècle (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009). Weinshenker, A God; Erika Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009); Anne L. Poulet and Guilhem Scherf, Clodion 1738–1814, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1992); James David Draper and Guilhem Scherf, Augustin Pajou: Royal Sculptor (1730–1809), exh. cat. (New York: Abrams, 1997); Anne L. Poulet and Guilhem Scherf, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment, exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003); James-David Draper and Guilhem Scherf, L’esprit créateur. De Pigalle à Canova: Terres-cuites européennes 1740–1840, exh. cat. (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2003); Gilles Grandjean and Guilhem Scherf, Pierre Julien: 1731–1804, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy, 2004); Maraike Bückling and Guilhem Scherf, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Die sinnliche Skulptur, exh. cat. (Munich: Hirmer, 2009). See also Aline Magnien, La nature et l’antique, la chair et le contour: Essai sur la sculpture française du XVIIIe siècle (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2004). For recent German publications, see Ursula Ströbele, Die Bildhaueraufnahmestücke der Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture 1700–1730 (Petersberg: Imhof, 2012); Eva Fischer-Hausdorf, Monumente der Aufklärung. Die Grab- und Denkmäler von Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, 1714–1785, zwischen Konvention und Erneuerung (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2012). For works on English tomb sculpture, see David Bindman and Malcolm Baker, Roubiliac and the EighteenthCentury Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); Matthew Craske, The Silent Rhetoric of the Body: A History of Monumental Sculpture and Commemorative Art in England, 1720–1770 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). The histoire des mentalités merged with the Annales school in France and represents the attempt to create a di∑erent history besides the established historical disciplines tought at university. Its historians aim to represent and explain people’s mentalities, namely their attitudes, ideas, and feelings, in a specific era. Philippe Ariès, “L’histoire des mentalités,” in La nouvelle histoire, eds. Jacques Le Go∑, Roger Chartier, and Jacques Revel (Paris: Retz, 1978), 402–23, see 423. See Michel Vovelle’s review of Ariès’s method, “Les attitudes devant la mort: problèmes de méthode, approches et lectures di∑érentes,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 31 (1976): 120–32. See also Philippe Ariès, Essais sur l’histoire de la mort en Occident du Moyen Age à nos jours (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1975), 236. See also Ariès, “L’histoire,” 423. See Naginski’s chapter about the Dauphin Monument and Diderot’s involvement in Sculpture, 93–161.

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wiebke windorf 012 Réau discusses the likely conceptual influence of the abbé Louis Gougenot or Charles-Nicolas Cochin the Younger on Pigalle’s monument: see Réau, J.-P. Pigalle, 89–92. In my follow-up project, I investigate these assumptions more closely. Generally speaking, such discourses of the secondary literature tend to overestimate the influence of any advisers and downplay the artist’s individual role. For a description of the artist’s general standing, see Thomas E. Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); Weinshenker, A God. 013 Correspondence on the commission’s awarding, construction, and site selection can be found in Jules Gui∑rey, “Le tombeau du maréchal de Saxe par JeanBaptiste Pigalle. Correspondance relative à ce monument (1752–1783),” Nouvelles archives de l’art français 3rd Serie 7 (1891): 161–234; Marc FurcyRaynaud, “Correspondance de M. de Marigny avec Coypel, Lepicié et Cochin,” part I, Nouvelles archives de l’art français 3rd Serie, 19 (1903): 30–31, 33–34, 357–59; Marc Furcy-Raynaud, Inventaire des sculptures commandées au XVIIIe siècle par la Direction Générale des Bâtiments du Roi, 1720–1790, (1909; Nogentle-Roi: Jacques Laget, 1997), 92–93; Marc Furcy-Raynaud, “Inventaire des sculptures exécutées au XVIIIe siècle pour la Direction des Batiments du Roi,” Archives de l’art français/Nouvelle période 14 (1927): 272–336; Yvonne Picard, “Nouveaux documents relatifs à l’histoire architecturale du monument du Maréchal de Saxe,” Archives alsaciennes d’histoire de l’art 11 (1932): 145–64. For major secondary literature, see Samuel Rocheblave, Le mausolée du maréchal de Saxe par J.-B. Pigalle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1901); Réau, J.-P. Pigalle, 86–99, 162, cat. no. 33; Eduard Hüttinger, “Pigalles Grabmal des Maréchal de Saxe,” in Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Antonio Morassi, ed. Gabriella Brussich and Isi Del Fabbro (Venice: Alfieri, 1971), 357–65; Jackson Harvey, “French Baroque Tomb Sculpture,” 141–51, cat. no. 52; Victor Beyer and Yves Mugler, Le mausolée du Maréchal de Saxe (Strasbourg: Hirlé-Oberlin, 1994); Wiebke Windorf, “Jean-Baptiste Pigalles Grabmal des Maréchal de Saxe, 1753–1777: Manifestation einer irdischen Unsterblichkeit,” in Wahrheit und Wahrhaftigkeit in der Kunst von der Neuzeit bis heute, eds. Stefanie Muhr and Wiebke Windorf (Berlin: Reimer, 2010), 25–43; Hausdorf, Monumente, 33–110. See also Étienne Jollet, “Stratas of Memory: The Steps in Pigalle’s Tomb of Marshal Maurice of Saxony,” in Transformer le Monument funéraire: Möglichkeitsräume künstlerischer Überbietung des französischen Monuments im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Birgit Ulrike Münch and Wiebke Windorf (Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net, 2021), 115–29. 014 Alphonse Roserot, “Mausolée du cardinal de Fleury, deux maquettes d’Edme Bouchardon,” Réunion des sociétés savantes des départements à la Sorbonne [ . . . ] Section des beaux-arts/Ministère de l’instruction publique [ . . . ] 17 (1893): 419–35; Gaston Brière, “Note sur le tombeau du cardinal Fleury par J.-L. Lemoyne. À propos d’un moulage du Musée de Versailles,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de l’Art Français (1908): 112–22; Alphonse Roserot, Edme Bouchardon (Paris: Librairie centrale des beaux-arts, É. Lévy, 1910), 69–82, 157; Réau, Les Lemoyne, 64–66, 122–23, 131, 142; Gerold Weber, “Edme Bouchardon: Studien

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zu seiner Stellung in der französischen Plastik des 18. Jhd” (PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1965), 28–46, 231–33; Jackson Harvey, “French Baroque Tomb Sculpture,” 444–46, cat. no. 68, 508–11, cat. no. 91, 512–13, cat. no. 92; Weinshenker, A God, 95–97. Lady [Emilia Francis Strong] Dilke, “Les Coustou. Les Chevaux de Marly et le Tombeau du Dauphin,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 25, no. 3 (1901): 5–14 and 203–14; Eugène Chartraire, “La sépulture du Dauphin et de la Dauphine dans la Cathédrale de Sens,” Bulletin de la Société Archéologique de Sens 22 (1906): 1–248; Gabriele Oberreuter-Kronabel, “La Richesse est la Mort du Sublime,” in Empfindung und Reflexion: Ein Problem des 18. Jahrhunderts, eds. Hans Körner, Constanze Peres, Reinhard Steiner, and Ludwig Tavernier (Hildesheim: Olms, 1986), 273–303; Naginski, Sculpture, 93–161. On March 19, 1753, Abel-François Poisson de Vandières, directeur général des bâtiments du Roi, presented two Pigalle projects to the king for consideration, as evidenced in a preliminary note from March 17, 1753. Furcy-Raynaud, “Inventaire des sculptures exécutées,” 278–79 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1073, no. 265]. The king chose the second draft. See Vandières’s letter to the painter Bernard Lépicié, chargé du détail des arts, from March 19, 1753 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1905/2, no. 3]: “Le Roy a approuvé, Monsieur, l’un des plans du Sr. Pigalle pour le tombeau de Mr. le Maréchal de Saxe, et c’est celuy ou le heros paroit descendre au tombeau que la mort ouvre à ses pieds [ . . . ].” This letter was published in Furcy-Raynaud, “Correspondance de M. de Marigny,” 33–34, but under a di∑erent archive specification [Arch. Nat. O/1/1908, minute]. See Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s second proposal, which was then chosen [Arch. Nat. O/1/1073, no. 267]. In Vandières’s handwriting, the following is written on the left of the sheet: “c’est celui ci– qui a été adopté” [This is the one— which was adopted]. The text was published only in an abridged form in Furcy-Raynaud, “Inventaire des sculptures exécutées,” 278, II. See Pigalle’s mémoire of 1776 in Furcy-Raynaud, Inventaire des sculptures commandées, 92–93 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1922/B]. For some of these aspects, see Windorf, “Jean-Baptiste Pigalles Grabmal,” 36–39. This term originated with Florence Ingersoll-Smouse. See La sculpture funéraire en France au XVIII siècle (Paris: Jouve & Cie, 1912). See Ingrid Roscoe, “Peter Scheemakers,” The Volume of the Walpole Society 61 (1999): 163, 169–70. Concerning the high fluctuation rate of Flemish sculptors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see François Souchal, Les Slodtz: Sculpteurs et décorateurs du Roi (1685–1864) (Paris: Boccard, 1967), 43–45. Because of the great impact of Flemish artists in Paris, Rome, and London, it is entirely possible that Pigalle came in contact with these artists and their big workshops. De Prohengues was to some extent involved in the decision about the monument’s placement; see Vandières to Pigalle, 24 June 1753 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1905/2, no. 5]. In this previously unpublished letter, Vandières asks Pigalle to visit the Marquis de Prohengues in his place to discuss the plans and ask him to deter-

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mine a suitable location for the funerary monument. About the Marquis de Prohengues, see Andreas Henning and Harald Marx, “Das Kabinett der Rosalba.” Rosalba Carriera und die Pastelle der Dresdener Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 120. De Prohengues to Vandières, Paris, May 22, 1752, in Furcy-Raynaud, “Inventaire des sculptures exécutées,” 274 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1073]: “[ . . . ] je ne saurois estre ny trop attentif, ny trop pressant pour un ami, un héros qui a bien servi le Roy et qui a mérité des marques qui désigneront à la postérité les services qu’il a rendus à l’État.” Jean-Baptiste Pigalle’s description of the selected model [Arch. Nat. O/1/1073, no. 267]: “[ . . . ] La piramide qui sert de fond à ce Mausolée, exprime l’immortalité où ses vertus l’ont elevé.” See also Furcy-Raynaud, “Inventaire des sculptures exécutées,” 278, II. Leon Battista Alberti, L’Architettura [De Re Aedificatoria], ed. Giovanni Orlandi and Paolo Portoghesi, vol. 2 (Milan: Ed. Il Polifilo, 1966), book VIII, chap. II, 672. François Lemée, Traité des statuës, ed. Diane H. Bodart and Henrik Ziegler, vol. 1 (1688; Weimar: Verl. u. Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2012), 271–72. François-Marie de Marsy, Dictionnaire abregé de peinture et d’architecture oú L’on trouvera les principaux termes de ces deux Arts avec leur explication [ . . . ], vol. 1 (Paris: Nyon; Barrois, 1746), 471. On the di∑erence between hommes illustres and grands hommes, see Martin Papenheim, Erinnerung und Unsterblichkeit: Semantische Studien zum Totenkult in Frankreich, 1715–1794 (Stuttgart: KlettCotta, 1992), 124–28. In his lettres philosophiques, Voltaire commends the Westminster Abbey tradition of erecting monuments to the greats (which for him include scholars, philosophers, artists, writers). See Voltaire, Lettres écrites de Londres. Sur les Anglois et autres sujets (Basle [London]: [Bowyer], 1734), 23eme lettre, 203–10, 206. See also Evrard Titon du Tillet, Essai sur les honneurs et sur les monumens accordés aux illustres sçavans, pendant la suite des siècles [ . . . ] (Paris: Chaubert, 1734), and Judith Colton, “Monuments of Men of Genius: A Study of Eighteenth Century English and French Sculptural Works” (PhD diss., New York University, 1974), 150–222. Colton, “Monuments of Men of Genius,” 314–404; Papenheim, Erinnerung, 182–85; Naginski, Sculpture, 163–216. See Vandières’s proposal to Lépicié from March 19, 1753 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1905/2, no. 3]. See also Furcy-Raynaud, “Correspondance de M. de Marigny,” 33–34 [Arch. Nat. O/1/1908, minute]; Windorf, “Jean-Baptiste Pigalles Grabmal,” 25–43. Denis Diderot to Étienne-Maurice Falconet, 10 January 1766, in Diderot et Falconet, Le Pour et le Contre: Correspondance polémique sur le respect de la postérité, Pline et les anciens auteurs qui ont parlé de peinture et de sculpture, ed. Yves Benot (Paris: Les Éd. Français Réunis, 1958), 53–60, see 58–59: “L’estime de la postérité est le seul bien que les Grands n’obtiennent qu’avec e∑orts; c’est le seul dont ils doivent être insatiables [ . . . ] cette immortalité ou l’espoir de

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french funerary monuments vivre dans la mémoire des hommes est la seule chose qui console de la brièveté de vie. La mort n’est terrible que pour celui qui voit tout s’éteindre avec sa vie, mais non pour celui dont la gloire ne peut mourir.” 032 All of Pigalle’s requests have been published by Gui∑rey. Gui∑rey, “Le tombeau du maréchal de Saxe,” 173–88. 033 See Janine Garrison, L’Edit de Nantes et sa révocation. Histoire d’une intolérance (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1985).

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Figure 7.1. Gérard Jean-Baptiste Scotin, illustration for Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (1724).

chapter 7

Meeting the Locals: Mythical Images of the Indigenous Other in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries melanie cooper

T

he disappearance of fantastical creatures from human belief has recently been described, rather evocatively, as a “great extinction,” which occurred over the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries.⁄ From the Renaissance period onward, the mythical beasts and monsters of unknown, unexplored regions of the globe slowly perished, revealed as chimeras of human fear and fancy by the interventions of modern science and European exploration. Steadily they fell from the Earth’s species as scientific inquiry and observation set about dismantling the authority of the ancients who had described the Earth’s wondrous species, ranging from ferocious Cyclopes and elusive unicorns, to varieties of humans whose anatomies deviated from the European norm.¤ Despite this apparent extinction, non-Western peoples retained a troubling alterity for Europeans whose responses to the unfamiliar continued to reflect a need to classify and assimilate in order to come to more comfortable terms with the Other.‹ In the early modern imagination, monstrous human races were to be discovered in remote locations far from the centers of Europe, a continent defined by its geographical borders and in comparison with the unknown world.› Mary Helen McMurran has explained that drawing comparisons between sources of antiquity and contemporary Indigenous cultural practices was central to early Enlightenment literature concerned with the 159

melanie cooper history and origins of the world’s religions and customs.fi The use of comparison as a method was typically allegorical in nature in support of broader arguments, despite the scientific aims of important texts including Jean Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723).fl As Peter Mason has astutely pointed out, from the time of Plinius the Elder’s Historia Naturalis, the exile of monstrous or mythical races beyond the known borders of Europe corresponded to the relentless drive of colonial expansion.‡ It is generally agreed that, despite the Enlightenment dream of a universal “brotherhood of man,” Europeans continued to define and position themselves as superior to those who appeared to fall short of Western cultural, political, social, and physical norms. This essay will demonstrate not only that this is clearly evident in visual representations of Indigenous peoples and lands encountered during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also that it is apparent that mythmaking continued to play an important role in shaping perceptions of place and Other. Despite the apparent extinction of mythical monsters, Europeans continued to construct new fictions in an attempt to elaborate points of origin and di∑erence that reinscribed the continual loop of hierarchical distinction and inferiority.

Joseph-François Lafitau and the Moeurs des Sauvages The ancient poets had described contact with “human, superhuman and subhuman others,” but did not provide coherent records of non-Western peoples.° Instead, they helped to establish “patterns and materials” from which Europeans could flesh out their own ideas and assumptions.· However, Bernard and Picart confirmed in writing Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Known World (1731) that since the ancients could not have known “the continent we call America,” for instance, the works of Plato and others “relating to unknown lands, ought to be considered no otherwise than as mere conjecture or the product of fancy.”⁄‚ In the Origin of the Fables (1724), Bernard Fontenelle described mythology as the “philosophy of the first ages,” stories concocted by “poor savages” as among the world’s first peoples in order to understand the causes of natural events and disasters.⁄⁄ While he conceded that humanity had made considerable progress in measuring causes and e∑ects in the world, Fontenelle and others of similar mind were dismayed at the “still current belief in demons” and superstition that continued to plague the collective imagination.⁄¤ He argued that: “Religion and good sense have 160

meeting the locals disabused us of the fables of the Greeks, but they still maintain themselves among us through poetry and painting, to which it seems the fables have found the trick of making themselves indispensable. Although we are incomparably more enlightened than those whose crude mentality invented the fables in all good faith, we easily recover the same outlook that made these fables so agreeable to them.”⁄‹ Even as Fontenelle acknowledged the appeal that the fables continued to hold over the imagination, he warned his readers that “imagination and reason rarely have any dealing with one another.”⁄› Despite appearing to be at odds with the Enlightenment demands of truth and reason, however, mythological figures continued to articulate and embellish ideas of human progress, origins, and cultural hierarchies. While the eighteenth century is long acknowledged as the foundational period of anthropology and the socalled human sciences, Europeans at this time were nonetheless deeply unsettled by the “limits of species identity.”⁄fi Edward Tyson’s famous dissection of an Orang-Outang (1699) is just one example of how science was put to work to reinforce the proximity between Earth’s creatures while simultaneously confirming that strange and exotic specimens were in fact di∑erent from humans. Importantly, Tyson’s notes from the dissection table were supplemented by another section, the title of which pointedly remarks that the satyrs, fauns, and cynocephali of classical myth “are all either apes or monkeys and not men as formerly pretended.”⁄fl That is, the creatures of myth were products of the imagination based on inaccurate records and reports of sightings in which varieties of monkeys and apes observed from a distance were mistaken for mythological hybrids. An essential tool for artists and viewers seeking to decipher coded meanings embedded within mythological images, Antoine Banier’s Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History (1739–40) also helps to shed some light on this case of mistaken identity. Banier explained that the name “satyr” was incorrectly assigned to “Monkeys being seen sometimes in the Woods, pretty much resembling men; or perhaps to the Appearance of Barbarians, resembling Monkeys at a distance.”⁄‡ He added that poets and painters from antiquity onward elaborated on the subjects of myth by “inventing Pan and the Satyrs like men.”⁄° National identity is often shaped alongside perceptions of anomaly and di∑erence so that nature’s wonders and beings of the imagination help to define boundaries and types according to a range of physical, cultural, and behavioral characteristics.⁄· 161

melanie cooper Though descriptions of varieties of monkeys and apes were often given by those who had not seen the creatures for themselves, images of both primates and their mythical counterparts provided a means of situating humanity within the Chain of Beings. The position of primates in the hierarchy of Creation formed a link between humans and the lowest of animalkind, while scientific inquiry and observation helped induce an uneasy form of recognition. While naturalists were prompted to wonder whether primates might instead be early humans living in a state of nature, satyrs were likewise associated with primal humanity living in a state of decline or arrested development outside of civilization. According to Francisco Vaz da Silva, the observed relationship between rams and “he-goats” implied that humans find their parallel in “horned” animals.¤‚ That is, “full” humanity is attained through cultural development upward from a primal state of being in nature, or from a “basic horned condition.”¤⁄ This idea is clearly visible in a book plate in Joseph-François Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparés aux moeurs des premiers temps, published in 1724. In two large volumes, the Moeurs des sauvages documents Lafitau’s observations of the Iroquois people living at the Kahnawake settlement on the south bank of the St. Lawrence River, almost opposite Montreal. Dedicated to the French Regent, Phillipe II, duc d’Orléans, the missionary’s text is richly illustrated with forty-two engraved plates detailing the religious artifacts, and social and cultural practices of the Iroquois people.¤¤ While some philosophes denigrated his work as simplistic and lacking in style, Lafitau was praised for his depth of knowledge and familiarity with the classics, and cited as an authority on primitive peoples.¤‹ Divided into three horizontal planes and three vertical sections, the untitled plate seen here (Figure 7.1) is intended to be read as an explication of cultural progression. Stephanie Pratt has proposed that Lafitau may have followed earlier examples, including Marc Lescarbot’s History of New France (1609), in the use of comparative analysis of Indigenous Americans with earlier groups through visual observations of physical appearance including body decoration and ornamentation.¤› In his explanatory notes, Lafitau identified the portrait in profile at the top left corner as Jupiter Ammon I, although he bears a close resemblance to the goat-god Pan with his thick beard and curled horn. The god directly faces a figure whose own horns have diminished and become less conspicuous, identified in Lafitau’s explication as Lysimachus.¤fi This man lacks a beard and possesses more refined facial features. 162

meeting the locals In her analysis of the bookplate, Pratt explains that Lafitau had drawn from earlier visual sources for this image, including an engraving by Theodore de Bry of colonial governor and artist John White’s image of a Weroan or “great Lorde” of Virginia. Used to illustrate Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Vırginia (1588), the engraving shows how feathers, and not the horn as used in Lafitau’s later bookplate, were used in the traditional headdress of the Weroan.¤fl Pratt argues that the point of Lafitau’s plate is to connect European traditions of horned helmets with earlier, “primitive” origins consistent with his aims of o∑ering a “unifying vision of humanity.”¤‡ However, the diminishing or shrinking horn he depicts is reminiscent of the belief that children are born with spiritual horns, and it is through lessons learned and behaviors corrected with education and discipline that their horns are removed.¤° These changes reflect the capacity to advance or improve with time and instruction. A more polished appearance, for example, reminds us of the necessary tools required for grooming, and the innovation or invention required to bring such tools into existence. While such physical traits point to the disciplined practice of grooming rituals, they also remind us of the visible distinction between early members of society and the unkempt man of the woods. Furthermore, the removal of facial hair was imperative to European gentlemen during the eighteenth century who considered the hair-free face not only more youthful in appearance, but also more open and legible. While beardless men were seen to be presenting their “true face” to their peers, the practice of shaving became synonymous with Western civilization.¤· In Lafitau’s Explanation of the Plates and Figures Contained in the Second Volume, he noted that, “This plate shows us the first clothing of men, their ornaments, what has given rise to the myth of the satyrs, and the symbolism which has been attached to the horns of animals.”‹‚ He further explained that, “the crested helmets of the Dukes of Brittany and of many Germanic families show that, not long ago, European people thought like the people of antiquity and as people think today in America, particularly the Iroquois for whom the term gannagaroni, [invested with antlers] a relative term, formed on onnagara which means an ‘antler,’ signifies to elevate a person [to high o≈ce] and render him illustrious.”‹⁄ In this way, Lafitau drew on the practice of wearing horns as a comparable example of common links and evolutionary progress between di∑erent cultures. In the preface to the work, 163

melanie cooper Lafitau compared the American Indian with the duc d’Orléans, therefore confirming that “at base,” all men are universally alike.‹¤ In the middle of the opposing profiles in Lafitau’s plate, another smaller face looks directly at the viewer, described as Isis dressed “with the skin of a bull with its horns and ears.”‹‹ Indeed, the headdress crowned with horns and ears appears rather more bovine than goatish. This could allude to the animal, which is more compliant and readily domesticated, as a midpoint between irredeemable barbarian and early civilizer. Beneath this trio from the left, a barbarian is represented as a thickset figure raising a heavy club above his head, the crude weapon and unformed wrap of cloth or skin representing rudimentary workmanship. The figure’s conspicuous ears, horn, and tail signify his status as closer to animals, and his limited achievement in the arts of war and defense is mirrored by the satyr figure facing him, who plays his uncouth horn, the instrument issuing spontaneous, unsophisticated sound limited to a single tone and note. Behind the first satyr, another turns his back to look onward into the future, holding not a single rough horn, but two crafted with care. This figure has begun to lose his goatish traits, and though he retains a short tail and horns, the hairy shanks and cloven hoof of the beast have disappeared. The technique of the satyr in fashioning his instrument is more complicated and signals cultural advance and innovation. The final figure in this sequence looks away from those who came before. Holding his bow in one steady hand, he represents early culture rising from the wild toward the advances of civilization, concealing his nudity with a more elaborate costume crafted with better materials and sophisticated hands. He who draws the bow demonstrates refinement with the products of culture, hunting, and combat. While Lafitau described the central satyrs “just as the ancient monuments represent them,” he also noted that the figure with the club represents an ancient German, while the other depicts an ancient American.‹› Both prepare for war. Here, the figures on either side of the satyrs represent the idea of contemporary Indigenous Americans as on a par with ancient European ancestors of the past. Importantly, the figures highlight Lafitau’s conviction that Indigenous people could be converted from paganism and adopt “civilized” customs. For Lafitau, Christianity and European knowledge facilitated progress as the “ultimate goal of all humanity.”‹fi Finally, the last row of images references conflict between opposing groups, signified by armor placed at each corner. In the middle, a pair raising swords on charging steeds engage in battle, referring again to 164

meeting the locals the domestication of beasts and the rigors of warfare. Lafitau’s explanatory notes state that this row represents the crests of the duc de Bretagne and an ancient family of Flanders and continues the ideas expressed in the rows above. The medallion in the center represents the prince of the House of France in a tournament against the duc de Bretagne, with each helmet “surmounted by his crest.”‹fl From gods and satyrs, ancient German and Indigenous American, through to the courtly cultures of Britain, France, and Flanders, the figures collectively represent a sliding scale of civilization in an attempt to explain how cultures advance from a common point of origin across time. Returning to the profile on the right opposing Pan, we notice that the features of this particular figure retain remnants of those features that place him as more advanced than the “savage” Wildman, but less advanced than the refined, eighteenth-century European. While later thinkers dismissed “primitive” people as “people without history,” Lafitau argued that people of the New World were capable of conversion and assimilation to European religious and cultural practices.‹‡ We see that the mythological figure of Jupiter/Pan and the satyr provided images against which Europeans were able to distinguish themselves in the same way that the startling di∑erences of non-European groups provided a sharp distinction from the polite social practices of Western civilization. While the disordered bodies of mythological hybrids were utilized as “prime signifier(s) of cultural di∑erence,” the eighteenthcentury American reflected a distant European history and reinforced notions of perfectibility toward the European ideal.‹° Comparing the customs of contemporary Indigenous groups with those of ancient “primitives” formed part of an attempt to show that wild or savage people could eventually become more civilized. Descartes had of course earlier taught that travel and encounters with non-Europeans was similar to going backward through time and conversing with men of past ages.‹· Similarly, Lafitau sought to establish a “progressive universal history” where contemporary Indigenous cultures retained and embodied the evidence of European origins.›‚ In Bernard and Picart’s Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the Known World, it is argued that the “American savages” owe their contentment to living in a state of nature, however, “they are as unpolish’d almost as brutes.”›⁄ While Bernard implied that their position is elevated slightly higher than the brutes he compares them to, he also emphasized that: “. . . they have neither the sentiments, the distinctions, 165

melanie cooper the ceremonies, nor the customs which in Europe are the genuine characteristics of a human creature. Wou’d a savage but live and dress after our manner; be a polite debauchee, and cease devouring his fellow-creatures, we then might rank him in the same class as ourselves. Our very whims and excesses still discover something of the rational creature.”›¤ Recalling the idea of the spiritual horns as something to be shed with discipline and experience, Bernard and Picart’s text frequently positions the Indigenous American as childlike and argues that politeness is born of subordination, whereas those seen to be living within a more independent social system are less polite.›‹ While Indigenous groups, humanoid primates, and “quasi-humans” were often considered a troubling reminder of common ancestral links, the mythical satyr was the antithesis of the enlightened citizen—a hybrid figure whose presence, like the Wildman’s, was “as requisite as its repression.”›› The role of the satyr and others who resisted the parameters of humanity not only embodied di∑erence as the Other, but they also reflected back shared origins and a dual nature. Physically characterized by visible features combining man and beast, and culture and nature, the figure of the satyr reminded the European citizen of their own becoming.

The Wallis Album Elaborating on the idea of cultural progression, Lafitau’s bookplate inspired the startling notion that the “Greeks had once been savages too.”›fi Similarly, Lafitau also elaborated his own hypothesis on the origin of the Iroquois as descended from the ancient Lycians of Asia Minor. The question of how the Iroquois and other Indigenous groups had come to be in the Americas was a problematic one and had sparked a range of controversial debates during the previous two centuries. Lafitau had accepted the seventeenth-century notion that Indigenous populations arrived in the Americas by migrating from regions of Asia before making their passage across vast expanses of ocean via “a transAtlantic land bridge of some sort.”›fl From antiquity onward, Ptolemy’s maps included an unknown landmass laying far beyond the stretches of ocean at the end of the world, described as terra incognita and known as the Antipodes from at least the late Roman times. Following Columbus’s travels across vast expanses of unknown ocean, the Pacific took on a new character, not only as an alien and terrifying place, but as a threshold to be crossed in the discovery of 166

meeting the locals new lands of untold riches and wonder. While it would be inaccurate to declare a classical heritage for the unexplored landmass invaded by Europeans in the late eighteenth century, the new continent that would come to be named Australia presented itself as a dystopia far removed from the idyllic notions of a Pacific paradise and the idealism of Rousseau’s natural man.›‡ While eighteenth-century writers considered the origins of humanity and culture from the perspective of upward progress or perfectibility across time, nineteenth-century perceptions of Indigenous culture looked the other way, regarding both Australian Aboriginals and American Indians as groups “doomed to extinction.”›° In this way, Indigenous groups were assessed and depicted as cultures in a state of perpetual decline rather than in terms of progress. As Ian McLean has pointed out, Indigenous Australians were regarded as either “beyond redemption,” outside the reach of civilization and “cast aside by history,” or else described as “ancient druids” or even “the witches of Macbeth.”›· Describing its position on the other side of the Earth by name, the Antipodes presented itself as Europe’s exact opposite and was considered an inversion in every way possible. To European eyes, the strange and unfamiliar presented a disturbing challenge to biblical Creation theory while o∑ering exciting new evidence for elaborating the “first scientifically credible theory of evolution.”fi‚ Bernard Smith explained that while Pacific flora and fauna o∑ered innumerable examples that appeared to deviate from Carl Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735) as much as from biblical accounts of Creation, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species (1895) later presented the theory of natural selection, which helped to account for various anomalies. Even as Darwin’s controversial theory was repulsed by Christianity, it nonetheless proved useful in supporting European strategies of control and disempowerment of groups considered to be at a technological disadvantage.fi⁄ As history has frequently revealed, however, European invasion and colonization was endorsed and seemingly justified long before Darwin’s ideas of natural selection were published. While the later work of anthropology “made this new country the most ancient land,” it is clear that the inhabitants of terra incognita and the spaces they occupied were represented in strangely opposing, though closely connected, forms.fi¤ On one hand, Indigenous people described akin to “wild animals of the forest” were seen to be as “at the very zero of civilization,” and on the other, they were deposited into landscape images assigned with classicizing titles that positioned them in a state of innocence.fi‹ 167

melanie cooper The contradiction between Indigenous Australia as a lost Arcadian site (or untouched paradise ripe for colonization) and as an unfamiliar landscape populated by diabolical savages outside history and beyond redemption was characterized in early colonial art by what McLean termed a “fractured aesthetic.”fi› The dislocated myths constructed by European responses to the Australian landscape and its inhabitants can be read in works defined by the picturesque tradition and those described as grotesque. While the picturesque presented a glowing view of the natural landscape and Indigenous groups coexisting with pastoral, cultivated vistas of colonial life, the grotesque aesthetic typical of some British artists expressed a contempt for the strangeness of the bush and for its people as oddities or dark inversions of European norms. The picturesque reflected the English taste of the period, formed in the rejection of eighteenth-century neoclassicism and driven by exploration and colonialism. As McLean observed, the picturesque di∑ered from the sublime landscape in that it represented a “historical landscape” bearing the signs of cultivation and occupation. Artists working in this tradition sought to reconcile nature and culture within images of the “hybrid in-between places” of civilization framed by a receding wilderness. This reconciliation helped to serve European claims of empire and described the redemptive vision of colonization.fifi The picturesque, however, was not within easy reach in the Australian landscape because here “nature was too wild.”fifl These tensions are clearly visible in an important album neatly presenting these disparate contradictions side by side. An album of original drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, circa 1817–1818, bound with An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales, contains a series of drawings “taken on the spot by Captain Wallis of the forty-sixth regiment” and engraved by Walter Preston, “a convict.”fi‡ The album is arranged in three sections. The first section is composed of a series of drawings of native flora and fauna, and includes one page of two Indigenous portrait sketches (Figure 7.2). This page will be explored in further detail below. As a middle section, “the history of the Settlement,” extracted from an edition of the Sydney Gazette published on December 26, 1818, is wedged between the front section of drawings and the last series of images produced by Wallis and Lycett. These appear immediately following copies of the black and white series of prints accompanying the text. The album’s publisher, Rudolph Ackermann, 168

Figure 7.2. James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, Portraits Flanked by Two Botanical Drawings, c. 1817–18.

melanie cooper had inserted the Gazette images and text “verbatim” due to his sense that it was “a Document so interesting and valuable to the work.”fi° Indeed, Ackermann had a point, for this text provides a context through which to read the drawings “taken on the spot” by Wallis, whose amateur hand can be readily distinguished from Lycett’s more practiced technique.fi· The author of the Gazette text explains that the accompanying engravings following the supplied narrative history of invasion and settlement help to show future generations of the colony “from what slender beginnings, and in how few years, the primeval forest . . . may be converted into plains covered with bleating flocks, lowing herds, and waving corn; may become the smiling seats of industry and the social arts, and be changed, from a mournful and desolate wilderness, into the cheerful village, the busy town, and the crowded city.”fl‚ Viewed from the “comforts and elegances of civilized life,” it is assumed that the future reader will come to appreciate the e∑orts and industry of the first settlers.fl⁄ Put another way, the representation of Indigenous Australians, the uncultivated landscape, and the wealth of its local wildlife, reproduced alongside a Eurocentric narrative of discovery and settlement, preserved an account of European colonization as a historical-mythical episode in which colonizers brought the spoils of civilization with them. The historical realities of conflict and displacement are removed from this mythical version of events, so that the only account of violence in the album’s drawings and prints is recorded in a single image of Indigenous men and omitted from representations of European settlers and colonial landscapes. While Preston and Lycett were noted as convict artists, no other reference to the area as a penal colony is made within the imagery found in the published album.fl¤ This is no accident, for the drawings and the printed extract sandwiched between them serve to record the origins of the newly established colony of New South Wales as a positive example from which to mark the triumphs of progress and cultivation. Following the Gazette extract, Lycett’s landscapes’ appearance alongside Wallis’s drawings emphasized this point. Depicting the Australian landscape in terms of opposition, Lycett contrasted the natural landscape populated by Indigenous people against the vast expanses of cultivated land overseen by “civilized” pastoralists. He likewise confirmed the argument expressed in the Gazette extract by repeating its sentiments himself almost word for word: “If we turn from the wild scenery of Australia in her pristine state, to view the benign changes which the arts and sciences of Britain . . . have produced upon this theatre of Nature, we shall have 170

meeting the locals before us one of the most pleasing studies which can engage the mind of the philosopher or the philanthropist. We behold the gloomy grandeur of solitary woods and forests exchanged for the noise and bustle of thronged marts of commerce, while the dens of savage men, have become transformed into peaceful villages or cheerful towns.”fl‹ As Lycett drew again on the image of the “cheerful town(s),” his words frame the “benign” changes introduced by Europeans in terms of amicable remedy and advantage. Jeanette Hoorn has observed that Lycett’s paintings are “distinctly positive” in representing the landscape as neatly cultivated spaces of civilization resulting from the investments of work and order introduced by European arrivals.fl› For Lycett and other colonials, Australia was no longer a penal purgatory but a land of free settlers whose e∑orts resulted in the “conversion of the land” and the quiet submission of Aboriginals sitting beneath trees or standing at a prescribed distance.flfi Framed by nature, Lycett’s views of the landscape present the emblems of European culture with the Indigenous presence rendered in miniscule. Visually and conceptually, the ordered structure of newly established towns and residences underpin the artist’s views of the landscape. Lycett’s work presents the peaceful cohabitation of Europeans overseeing the land, dotted with neat buildings and straight fences, and Indigenous people quietly permitting their own relocation to its edges. From the time of Cook’s Pacific voyages, it was vital to present images of Europeans as peacemakers bestowing the blessings of civilization on peoples indigenous to the Pacific.flfl Accompanying Cook on his third voyage of 1784, artist John Webber catered to the popular demand for the “exotic picturesque” that omitted the violent events of Cook’s voyage.fl‡ This imperative was inherited by successive generations of colonizers and artists endorsing the “frontier myth” in their recourse to the picturesque and grotesque, which defined and separated European settlement from the wild, and is taken up again throughout the Wallis album.fl° Appearing almost randomly placed amongst drawings of floral, bird, and fish species, a watercolor drawing of a bare-chested Indigenous male regards the viewer (Figure 7.2). The slant of his shoulders and strange grin inspire a sense of unease. His portrait is framed on either side by two samples of native flowers identified by their botanical names Tetrabatica and Zeianthimum. Inscribed by Wallis’s hand, the dark figure is named “Dick.” Lightly sketched in pencil, a portrait of Burigon or “Jack” appears within a separate frame above Dick’s head. These figures have been identified as the “Awabakal brothers.”fl· 171

melanie cooper Wedged between illustrations of nature, these men are defined and represented by their perceived lack of humanity. Indeed, the handwritten inscription appearing directly beneath Dick’s portrait underscores this point. In Wallis’s small print is written: “Nature in a sportive humour or contrast between Animal and vegetable Life in New South Wales. The former hideous disgusting and barbarous, the latter graceful modest and gratifying to the senses, the Aborigines of New South Wales are the most perfect savages in existence. The world of flowers exceed beauty and variety those of any other parts of the world, from the gigantic lily, towering twelve feet from its root, to the modest violet.”‡‚ Without attempting to conceal his contempt, Wallis categorized the Awabakal people of the Newcastle district as equal to animals and contrasted them with the “vegetable Life” he found more pleasing. In describing these people as “the most perfect savages in existence,” Wallis did not regard them in the same light as the noble savage, but rather as the epitome of rude and uncivilized savagery. Simply put, savagery was defined by a lack of institutions, laws, religion, and morality.‡⁄ Wallis later repeated his view, adding another line beneath his first paragraph that notes that “Dick killed Burigon one day with one blow.” Underlining “one,” Wallis highlighted the brute strength and violent tendencies of “uncivilized” peoples characterized by their apparent lack of reason and morality. It is not hard to imagine that, as a religious man, Wallis would have disdained the lack of Christian morality he perceived as typical of Indigenous culture.‡¤ As Smith has pointed out, the perspectives of Christian missionaries and colonizers highlighted the heedless savage as a figure worthy of contempt or patronizing clemency.‡‹ Drawn by a soldier who expressed his “disgust” of the “Animal” life in New South Wales, Dick’s portrait takes on qualities of the grotesque. His body composed of broad washes of black watercolor, Dick’s facial features are outlined by exaggerated contours and vague tonal modeling. The fixed stare and broad grin contrast sharply against the profile of his victim, sketched in light pencil outlining thickset features. Taking on qualities of caricature and described as a violent aberration, Dick represents a type, as does Burigon, whose pale pencil portrait fades in line with the perceived fate of his race. Immediately following the Gazette extract and prints, Lycett’s colonial landscapes alternate with Wallis’s drawn observations of Indigenous people. In three of Wallis’s drawings, the figures are pictured in seated group formations (Figure 7.3). Naked save for loincloths in all 172

Figure 7.3. James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People with Beach and River Inlet and Distant Aboriginal Group in Background, c. 1817–18.

Figure 7.4. James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, Vıew of Awabakal People, c. 1817–18.

meeting the locals but one composition, the figures are all represented within the natural environment. In each instance, they appear with vast expanses of water behind them, and in one drawing (Figure 7.4), it appears as though Wallis has attempted to capture something of the corroboree, an Australian Aboriginal ritual, by inserting two figures making dance movements and unnoticed gestures behind the group. In another drawing (Figure 7.5), a group of five silently stand, two of them holding spears and two holding shields. In the far distance, other figures can be discerned along a river’s edge and beneath a mountainous horizon. Among this last series of drawings, this image alone includes names as labels inscribed beneath the individuals represented. The central figure is marked with ceremonial body paint, his hair pulled tightly upward and lengths of bone protruding beneath his nose and either side of his head. The figures appear lined up before the viewer as types, their lack of expression and vacant gaze not only the mark of an amateur artist, but also of muted silence. In his work on New World bodies, Mason has noted that the human head provided “an index of humanity” from at least the medieval period, and this is clearly evident in both the horns of the satyr and Lafitau’s evaluation of the Iroquois as living remnants of an ancient culture.‡› In its placement, the bone decoration in Wallis’s drawing (Figure 7.5) recalls the significance of animal horn as discussed above. In addition, a striking feature of Wallis’s drawn observations of the Awabakal people is the near homogeneity of their physical features. His manner of treating hair and facial features betrays a sameness and lack of individuality, the dark contours of faces and bodies reduced to thick, flat shapes jotted down with minimal realism. This is perhaps the unconscious gesture of an untrained amateur, but also expresses Wallis’s perception of Indigenous culture as unremarkable and lacking civilization. As civilization is a process that marks the body in dress and custom, the nudity of the figures is therefore taken as indicative of a simplistic inability to discriminate and innovate.‡fi The sameness of these figures, represented as a singular type throughout the drawings, is disrupted, however, by an image of a bearded man who dominates one composition with his striking di∑erence (Figure 7.6). Seated in the center among his peers, the odd one out wears a red military coat that signals contact and exchange with Europeans. More than this, it recalls the colonial e∑ect of inadequate imitation as a grotesque and disturbing means of representing the apparent failure 175

Figure 7.5. James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, Vıew of a River Landscape with Five Cut Out Pasted Down Drawings of Five Standing Aborigines, c. 1817–18.

Figure 7.6. James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People, c. 1817–18.

melanie cooper or inability of Indigenous people to “become white, rather than exemplifying real cultural di∑erence.”‡fl Those who adopted European manners or dress were considered poor imitators, ridiculed as comical or unnatural. As writer Anthony Trollope later observed, “the deportment of the dignified aboriginal is that of the sapient monkey imitating the gait and manners of a do-nothing white dandy.”‡‡ While Lafitau, Wallis, and Lycett each mirrored (mis)perceptions of foreign lands and non-Europeans, they also demonstrated that European explorers and colonizers found it di≈cult to fit Indigenous groups within the conventions of Judeo-Christian tradition and history. In order to come to terms with the unfamiliar, it seemed necessary to interpret and communicate di∑erence in European terms.‡° Lafitau insisted that Native Americans and other Indigenous populations retained the remnants of religious and cultural practices common to all human groups, and his work sought to demonstrate that all people were capable of improvement and upward progress. In contrast, Australian Aboriginals and other Indigenous populations came to be viewed as primitive cultures in a state of perpetual decline, fated to extinction. Assigning non-Europeans a lower position in evolutionary terms provided the justification for colonization and naturalized concepts of inferiority.‡· In this way, it is clear that the work of this mythology and its representation in visual culture persisted long after the disappearance of the pagan gods and mythical beasts, revitalized and put to the service of invasion and the practices of colonization. 001 Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Ti≈n, Wild Man from Borneo: A Cultural History of the Orangutan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2014), 1. 002 Ibid. 003 Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London: Routledge, 1990), 161. 004 Ibid., 109. 005 Mary Helen McMurran, “Rethinking Superstition: Pagan Ritual in Lafitau’s Moeurs des Sauvages,” in Mind, Body, Motion, Matter: Eighteenth-Century British and French Literary Perspectives, eds. Mary Helen McMurran and Alison Conway (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 110. 006 Jacques Revel, “The Uses of Comparison: Religions in the Early Eighteenth Century,” in Bernard Picart and the First Global Vısion of Religion, eds. Lynn Hunt, Mary Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010), 331. Bernard and Picart’s monumental work was first published in Amsterdam in 1723. This first edition can be accessed via UCLA’s Digital Library at http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/picart/index.html. 007 Mason, Deconstructing America, 161.

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meeting the locals 008 Anthony Grafton, April Shelford, and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992), 45. 009 Ibid., 45. 010 Jean Frederic Bernard and Bernard Picart, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the Known World. Represented in Above an Hundred Copper-Plates. Designed by the Famous Picart. Together with Historical Explanations and Several Curious Dissertations. Written originally in French and now published in English, with very considerable Amendments and Additions. (London, Printed for Nicholas Prevost and comp. at the Ship, against Southampton Street in the Strand, London, 1731), Volume III, 2. All the material cited in this paper is taken from Volume III. 011 Bernard Fontenelle, On the Origin of the Fables, in The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680–1860, eds. Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), 12. 012 Feldman and Richardson, Introduction to The Rise of Modern Mythology, 7. 013 Fontenelle, On the Origins of the Fables, 16–17. 014 Ibid. 015 Richard Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity on the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2003), 6, 26. 016 Edward Tyson, Orang-outang, sive Homo Silvestris: or, The anatomy of a pygmie compared with that of a monkey, an ape, and a man. To which is added, A philological essay concerning the pygmies, cynocephali and sphinges of the ancients. Wherein it will appear that they are all either apes or monkeys, and not me, as formerly pretended (London: T. Bennet and D. Brown, 1699). 017 Antoine Banier, The Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History (New York: Garland Publishing, 1976), 592. 018 Ibid., 593. 019 Felicity Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 020 Francisco Vaz da Silva, “Sexual Horns: The Anatomy and Metaphysics of Cuckoldry in European Folklore,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 2 (2006): 401. 021 Ibid. 022 Joseph-François Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, ed. and trans. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore (Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1974), vols. 1–2. Fenton and Moore explain that Phillipe was already ill at the time Lafitau was preparing his manuscript, and had died before its publication. See Cribb, Gilbert, and Ti≈n, Wild Man from Borneo. 023 James Evans, “Joseph-François Lafitau: A Disciple of Herodotus among the Iroquois,” in The Classical Tradition and the Americas (CTA), Volume 1: European Images of the Americas and the Classical Tradition, eds. W. Haase and Reinhold Meyer (1994; Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011). This article can be found at

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http://www.academia.edu/6171000. Mary Helen McMurran recently confirmed that contemporaries including Voltaire criticized Lafitau for concluding that Americans were descended from Greeks of antiquity simply because each group held activities including dance and hunting in common. Writers like Voltaire argued that, instead, shared commonalities in cultural practices and materials could be explained by “shared humanity” and social conditions. McMurran cites François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’espirit des nations, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier frères, 1963), 1:30. See McMurran, “Rethinking Superstition,” 119–20. Stephanie Pratt, “The American Time Machine: Indians and the Visualization of Ancient Europe,” in Envisioning the Past: Archaeology and the Image, eds. Sam Smiles and Stephanie Moser (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 58–60. Joseph-François Lafitau, “Explanation of the Plates and Figures Contained in the Second Volume,” in Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, 2:5. Also known as Zeus/Ammon, Jupiter Ammon is a syncretic deity combining the attributes of the Roman god Jupiter (Zeus as Greek equivalent) with Ammon (or Amun), an ancient Egyptian god of the sun and air. Syncretism is the Egyptian practice of combining two di∑erent entities into a single figure. Both Jupiter and Ammon were revered as king or ruler of the gods, while the Greek god Pan personifies lust and retains the physical features and characteristics of a goat as protector of flocks, herds, and woodlands. Pratt, “The American Time Machine,” 62. Ibid., 63. Vaz da Silva, “Sexual Horns,” 401. Angela Rosenthal, “Raising Hair,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 2–3. Lafitau, “Explanation of the Plates and Figures,” 5. Lafitau, Customs of the American Indians, 2:25. William N. Fenton and Elizabeth L. Moore, comments in footnotes of Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians, 1:2–3. Lafitau, “Explanation of the Plates and Figures,” 5. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the complex role of the Egyptian goddess Isis was summarized as protector of women and marriage, and goddess of maternity, new life, fertility, and abundant harvests. See Richard L. Gordon, “Isis” in The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., eds. Simon Hornblower, Anthony Spawforth, and Ester Eidinow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Lafitau, “Explanation of the Plates and Figures,” 5. Pratt, “The American Time Machine,” 66. Lafitau, “Explanation of the Plates and Figures,” 5. David Allen Harvey, “Living Antiquity: Lafitau’s Moeurs des sauvages amériquains and the Religious Roots of the Enlightenment Science of Man,” New College of Florida 36 (2008): 83–84. Harvey mentions Hegel as one of these later thinkers. Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 26.

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meeting the locals 039 William B. Cohen, The French Encounter with Africa: The White Response to Blacks, 1530–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 77. 040 Harvey, “Living Antiquity,” 76. 041 Bernard and Picart, Religious Ceremonies, 35. 042 Ibid. 043 Ibid., 57. 044 Nash, Wild Enlightenment, 3, 11. 045 Mason, Deconstructing America, 24. 046 James Evans, “Joseph-François Lafitau: A Disciple of Herodotus Among the Iroquois,” no pagination. 047 Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 1–4, 9–10. 048 V. G. Kierman, “Noble and Ignoble Savages,” in Exoticism and the Enlightenment, eds. Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 110–11. 049 McLean, White Aborigines, 28, 37. The descriptions of Aborigines as ancient druids and pagan witches, as well as figures resembling “Neptune or Jupiter” can be found in explorer Thomas Mitchell’s Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, 2nd ed., vol. 1 (London: T&W Boone, 1839), 126. 050 Bernard Smith, European Vısion and the South Pacific, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), viii. 051 Ibid., ix. 052 Ian McLean, “Reclaiming Terra Australia: The Port Jackson School and its Exile,” Art and Australia 33, no. 1(1995): 102. 053 Peter Cunningham, Two Years in New South Wales (London: Henry Colburn, 1827), 39–40. Cited in McLean, White Aborigines, 29. An example of the “classicizing” landscape can be found in John Glover, The Birth of Diana, van Diemen’s Land (1837). 054 McLean, White Aborigines, 35–36. 055 Ibid., 35. 056 Ibid., 36. 057 The full title of this album reads Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, ca. 1817–1818, bound with “An Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements”; an Illustration of Twelve Vıews Engraved by W. Preston, a Convict: From Drawings Taken on the Spot, by Captain Wallis, of the Forty-Sixth Regiment, To which is Subjoined An Accurate Map of Port Macquarie, and the Newly Discovered River Hastings, by J. Oxley, Esq; Surveyor General to the Territory (London: Printed For R. Ackermann, Repository of Arts, Strand, by J. Moyes, Greville Street, 1821). The variant title is listed online as The Wallis Album, ca. 1817–1818 by the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. See http://www2.sl .nsw.gov.au/archive/discover_collections/history_nation/wallis/wallis_album /index.html. 058 Rudolph Ackermann, “To the Public,” in The Wallis Album, ca. 1817–1818, no pagination.

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melanie cooper 059 Wallis described his method of drawing from observation in this phrase, which forms part of the album’s title. 060 Sydney Gazette, December 26, 1818, reproduced in the 1821 edition of The Wallis Album, ca. 1817–1818, 1. 061 Ibid., 2. 062 Note, however, that the original album found and purchased by the State Library of New South Wales in 2011 contains Lycett’s original watercolors, where he has inscribed “Drawn by a convict” in reference to himself, beneath them. 063 Joseph Lycett, “Picturesque Views in Australia,” in Documents in Art and Taste in Australia, ed. Bernard Smith (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1975), 27. 064 Jeanette Hoorn, “Joseph Lycett: The Pastoral Landscape in Early Colonial Australia,” Art Bulletin of Vıctoria 26 (1986): no pagination, www.ngv.vic.gov.au /essay/joseph-lycett-the-pastoral-landscape-in-early-colonial-australia/. 065 Ibid. Lycett’s painting is held in the National Gallery of Victoria and can be viewed in this article, or at www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work /27429. 066 Bernard Smith, Imagining the Pacific: In the Wake of the Cook Voyages (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992), 205. 067 Ibid., 195, 206. 068 McLean, “Reclaiming Terra Australia,” 96. See also Jeanette Hoorn, “Exposing the Lie of Terra Nullius,” Art and Australia 31, no. 1 (Spring 1993). 069 The Awabakal people are the traditional custodians and original inhabitants of coastal regions of New South Wales, with territories reaching from Wollombi in the west to the Lower Hunter River near Newcastle and Lake Macquarie on the eastern coast, https://www.awabakallalc.com.au/about-us/, accessed June 22, 2021. 070 James Wallis, inscription appearing on the Wallis Album image identified by call number PXE 1072, State Library of New South Wales, www.acmssearch.sl .nsw.gov.au/search/itemDetailPaged.cgi?itemID=954703. 071 Cornelius J. Jaenen, “‘Les Sauvages Ameriquains’: Persistence into the 18th Century of Traditional French Concepts and Constructs for Comprehending Amerindians,” Ethnohistory 29, no. 1 (1982): 46. 072 McMurran has also noted that perceptions of moral ineptitude and “mental weakness” of non-Western groups were deeply entrenched in Western theology and philosophy. See “Rethinking Superstition,” 120. 073 Smith, European Vısion, 317. 074 Peter Mason, “Reading New World Bodies,” in Bodily Extremities: Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, eds. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 159. 075 Mason explains that bodies are “definitely and definitively marked by culture.” See ibid., 148. 076 Jane Lydon, Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 163.

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meeting the locals 077 Anthony Trollope, Australia, ed. O. D Edwards and R. B Joyce (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1967), 100. Cited in McLean, White Aborigines, 30. 078 Peter Mason and Bernard Smith are among numerous historians who have pointed this out. In Deconstructing America, Mason explained how Europeans sought to understand the unfamiliar by classifying and assimilating, as well as drawing on conventional representation to help establish boundaries and definitions. In this way, the New World is viewed through European perspectives, 41–44. 079 Lydon, Eye Contact, 174.

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Figure 8.1. Willem van de Velde, A Dutch Two-Decker and Galjoot Lying-by with the Fleet at Sea, 1672.

chapter 8

Infernal Machines: Designing the Bomb Vessel as Transnational Technology jennifer ferng

To the art of mechanics is owing all sorts of instruments to work with, all engines of war, ships, bridges, mills, curious roofs and arches, stately theatres, columns, pendent galleries, and all other grand works in building. Also clocks, watches, jacks, chariots, carts and carriages, and even the wheel-barrow. Architecture, navigation, husbandry, and military a∑airs, owe their invention and use to this art.⁄ William Emerson, The Principles of Mechanics, 1754/1773

E

ighteenth-century shipwrights willingly participated in the global escalation of military engagement over open waters, where European empires were established not by the slow erection of fortresses on land but by the covert swiftness of naval vessels operating at sea. Driven by cumulative innovations in maritime technologies evolving from economic and political demands, the transatlantic regions lying along the coastal edges of Northern and Western Europe, like various countries around the world, laid their imperial foundations through the unfolding development of martial inventions that stimulated the spread of dominant colonial powers.¤ In particular, the Dutch galjoot, later known as a galiote à bombe by the French, and then as the bomb ketch by the British, signaled a pivotal innovation in the history of naval architecture and maritime navies, as an instance of engineering design that relied upon gradual modifications, which augmented the vessel’s e≈ciency for launching devastating armaments. 185

jennifer ferng Pioneered by a number of di∑erent shipbuilders over several hundred years, the bomb vessel embodied not a singular, unique design but rather a deliberate sequence of e∑orts jointly revised by Dutch, French, and British naval constructors, who refined the changing frontal profile of this distinctive ship to bear the weight of its incendiary devices. No di∑erent than chariots or carriages fueled by built-in mechanical engines, ships and the architecture of navigation owed their existence to the smooth running of technical apparatuses located inside the body of the hull. Bomb vessels, like any other feat of engineering, demanded a concentrated precision of mechanical parts, a delicate balance between geometry and material choice, as well as an e≈cient spatial layout of interior compartments. Transnational networks facilitated by the crossover between French and British shipwrights, along with multiple editions of shipbuilding treatises in various languages, encouraged the mobility of ideas that allowed the bomb vessel to flourish as a transnational technology. That is to say, its shared design characteristics across various nations served as evidence of not only its e∑ectiveness as a ship, but also its migration across European boundaries. In stark contrast to the isolated character of singular inventions created by one individual, mutual ideas about shipbuilding as a practice were capable of transcending the limitations imposed by cultural di∑erence and lack of geographic proximity.‹ Judged as coarse tradesmen, European shipwrights did not exist as a separate genre of craftsmen until the late sixteenth century. By the tender age of seven, apprentices were allowed by law to start learning methods of building through their mastery of the “techniques of design of complex ship structures: selection and treatment of wood, its seasoning, forming, attachment, caulking, rigging, hull form and shape,” which formed the basis of their principal education.› In Britain, the given title of shipwright, which designated the craftsmanship of naval vessels as a trade acquired through firsthand experience, was first conferred upon Matthew Baker in 1572. William H. German recounted that the shipwright as a designer/builder was mostly involved in the production of ships: “of necessity [he] had to address himself to the problems of organizing material, manpower, tools, and equipment, a location on the river bank, and finance, in order to put a very highly complex ‘machine’ together in a given period of time.”fi Through a hands-on process of learning by doing, shipwrights produced their designs though practical firsthand experience and model-making— 186

infernal machines a notable emphasis moving away from three-dimensional models of form and toward extrapolated projections of hulls based on two-dimensional drawings. Fabrication practices of a shipwright were extremely makeshift in nature, vastly dependent upon the acute visual eye of the tradesman who was responsible for a ship’s design. Overt errors in mathematical calculation were often immediately corrected with an estimated guess; for example, techniques known as girdling—a common practice of applying wood sheathing of a selected thickness to the underwater portion of the hull—were completed through visual confirmation, by adding planks of wood where appropriate. Engineers and shipwrights never fully abandoned processes of trial and error, but they did begin to apply and use mathematics more thoroughly in their work. Summed up, observation and experimentation were expected to supplement the ways of the geometer.fl Inclusive deviations in a ship’s design could be made quite apparent, even to a layperson—the curving lines, proportions, and performative aspects of a ship’s hull resulted from adaptations in the vessel’s profile, structural members, and materials.‡ The ability to identify these details charted a projected path of technical development, dependent on architectural plans and mathematical calculations. Builders often could draw plans but sometimes they did not employ mathematical calculations when constructing a ship.° Architecture as the art of building was made relevant to the extended systemization of knowledge that incorporated the building techniques of naval vessels, or the design or framing of any complex structure. In fact, some of the similar skills practiced by naval constructors were echoed in the training of early modern architects. Therefore, after the death of Louis XIV, the French Naval Council ordered master shipwrights to be called master constructors (maîtresconstructeurs), attempting to position senior shipwrights into the lowest ranks of polite society.· Waged by these newest members of professional trades, the maritime trade was soon radically transformed by the technological engineering behind the craftsmanship of a naval vessel, whose so-called “design superiority” often earned glowing praise from navy men, dockyard o≈cials, and royal navy boards.⁄‚ On the one hand, military technologies and the nature of innovation tended to eclipse impulses of imitation, which were critical to the technological revisions of the bomb vessel.⁄⁄ Imitation, in fact, came well before aspects of innovation in the eighteenth century, and engineering innovators were often socially perceived as outcasts, 187

jennifer ferng punished for the promise of their ingenuity. On the other hand, there is significant evidence of creativity and entrepreneurship in the design of the bomb vessel, which evolved through the hands of several shipwrights in the Netherlands, France, and Britain as an occasional matter of national espionage and, sometimes, political pressure. In this chapter, naval architecture and its attendant techniques lay at a tangled crux between aesthetics, engineering, and military exercises. Designing bomb vessels as a form of transnational technology revolutionized from the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, as specific design functions related to movement, weight, and storage were revised. In studying some British shipbuilding techniques, Napoleon’s naval architect Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent Forfait recommended in 1788 that “a vessel is an extremely composite machine, or rather it is a combination of most known machines. To understand the e∑ects of that combination, it is not enough to determine separately what each part is capable of, but moreover to have regard for the diverse relationships that the particular results have with the assembly.”⁄¤ Sailing warships and bomb vessels, as a result, consisted of complex engineering structures that merged heavy wooden construction with coordinated rigging to support ship masts. These composite machines were manufactured for a number of functions that dictated their design—to withstand environmental elements of wind and water, to house hundreds of men for months or years at a time, and to endure for a period of at least twenty to thirty years, to name but a few. More important than functional considerations, the consequential mobility of ideas spurred intellectual exchanges between European countries that materialized in the form of technical adaptations to naval bomb vessels. Viewed through the lens of the history of technology, naval architecture as a product of cultural, economic, and political innovation magnified the copying of ideas but also emphasized their transference from one cultural context into multiple others. Through the medium of drawing, the bomb ketch was readapted over time, allowing for modest yet incremental improvements in the craftsmanship of the vessel. French and British constructors eventually boosted the military advantages of the galiote à bombes, which balanced firepower potential with agility and seaworthiness. Cross-cultural exchanges surrounding the design of naval vessels did not favor originality behind a singular design but instead formulated appropriations of technological modifications that grew over time. Far from being merely deterministic in their practice, shipwrights and naval 188

infernal machines constructors, I contend, demonstrated an innate ability to innovate using transnational precedents to strike a balance between e≈ciency and aesthetic design. As an extension of this argument, I assert that French and British administrators and constructors amended the original galjoot to suit their own purposes of warfare and trade. The British campaign for precision adjusted the bomb vessel over a period of a hundred years, clarifying design changes until the ship achieved an ideal set of dimensions. Born out of political necessity, these infernal machines embodied an early modern strategy of terror on the oceans, later perfected by the British admiralty who made the French navy a victim of their own skillful invention. What I term “technological revisioning,” which occurred over many decades, did not simply eschew originality as a source of historical development but instead emphasized modes of adaptation and appropriation that allowed the bomb vessel to assume its anticipated standards.

Drawing and the Science of Naval Architecture Despite its marginal status in eighteenth-century studies, naval architecture and the study of designs of naval vessels tend to fall into a distinctive gap between disciplines—history, art history, and literature—and often collapse historical techniques home to one discipline into those of another. In this case, the visual and technical qualities of ship design lend themselves to a more considered examination of how naval architecture thrived on the transmission of engineering details rather than on wholesale originality. David McGee has explored three distinct traditions that characterize the technologies of the past—craft, mechanical, and architectural—emphasizing that the case of naval architecture produces “conditions that made it possible even to consider the application of science in design, as well as to study the di≈culties that stood in the way of a scientific approach to technology in the early modern period.”⁄‹ Investigating the linkages between design, drawing, and science in this third tradition, as he implies, can begin to account for the expected promise and problems of science within premodern technologies. Drawings, in e∑ect, allowed for a faster pace of innovation since shipwrights only focused on the geometric constraints of an artifact on paper and thus were not forced to address any of the logistics associated with materials, labor, or even physical forces such as water displacement. The “transference of the craft trial-and-error process 189

jennifer ferng onto paper”⁄› ordained that graphic representations of designs did not emphasize novelty but resulted from overcoming the necessary uncertainty attached to modes of innovation.⁄fi O≈cially recognized as its own genre, naval architecture quietly emerged as part of the discipline of shipbuilding through a pivotal citation in Portuguese engineer João Baptista Lavanha’s 1610 unpublished treatise, which defined the practice as, “[that] with certain rules teaches the building of ships, in which one can navigate well and conveniently.”⁄fl Lavanha consciously employed Vitruvian principles to outline many of his theories that included naval design as part of the architect’s mandate. Along these lines, the design of naval ships incorporated some of the same planning principles employed in the construction of buildings. In fact, design was cast in an analogous manner by German architect Joseph Furttenbach, who, in Architectura Navalis (1629), incorporated ship design as a subset of a range of architectural typologies that included military, civilian, and recreational constructions. Pierre Bouguer’s Traité du navire (1746) and Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau’s Elémens de l’architecture navale ou traité pratique de la construction des vaisseaux (1752) similarly compiled together a wide range of French techniques, including the application of theoretical geometry to the patterns of ship hulls. Bouguer’s explanations predicted the performance of a ship before it was even built. He presented an accurate method for calculating the volumetric water displacement of a ship and discovered the metacenter of ships, or a point in space whose position in a ship relative to its center of gravity governs its stability. His treatise concluded with examining various bow shapes that provided the least amount of resistance or greatest speed.⁄‡ Geometry and shipbuilding, in fact, developed as inextricably linked processes that reinforced each other. Ruled by durability, utility, and beauty, naval vessels were thus strictly beholden to the same principles that governed the design of buildings. Bouguer’s convention of the architectural section (known as coupe, section, and profil) demonstrates the close kinship between naval architecture and engineering. Duhamel’s introduction of mathematical culture to naval constructors urged them to interrogate the old rules of shipbuilding in order to achieve the best type of practice, in other words, to combine mathematics with natural intuition. Despite the lack of skilled training among navy builders, he trusted the rational organization of basic concepts and stressed that ingrained respect for inquiries into the limits of everyday building techniques was fervently needed.⁄° 190

infernal machines Architectural historian Mario Carpo has insisted that even early modern architects Vitruvius and Leon Battista Alberti, like shipwrights, communicated numeric dimensions primarily through writing, emphasizing how proportions were presented as nonvisual information.⁄· Framed as a genealogy of the architectural design, “the conception of the forms of the ship takes its bearing from these [cross] sections,” as historians of science Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin propose. In fact, “the forms are engendered in succession, starting from the two first and principal vertical sections, and traverse the ship’s body at its points of maximum length and maximum width.”¤‚ The increasing rift between the architectural design of a vessel and its construction was articulated through the manner in which plans and sections were required. A section exemplified a vertical projection according to a plan, or doubled, a “plan in section.” Bouguer remarked that the term “section” in shipbuilding was applied to all sections made perpendicular to the ship’s length, the first one being the largest of all, which indicated the master model or midship frame.¤⁄ He was strictly concerned with speaking to his readers as a mathematician and physicist, leaving the details of actual construction to the past experience of his workers. It became necessary to “buttress, bind, brace” all of the components of a ship together “in order to unite all the forces being exerted like so many levers.”¤¤ A ship’s dimensions were not subjected to the strict laws of mechanics.

Dutch Origins to French Adaptations The bomb vessel’s early modern origins can be traced to the Netherlands, where Dutch maritime power reached its crest of influence around 1664, incorporating territories from Rio Sao Francisco, the Brazilian Amazon, the sugar islands of Saint Thomé and Annobom in the Gulf of Guinea, and the Malacca Straits.¤‹ Immortalized in paintings by artist Willem van de Velde, the Dutch galjoot was often paired with heavier, large capacity vessels such as the two-decker (Figure 8.1). Employed for fishing and routine dispatch work such as carrying mail and passengers, the galjoot was frequently utilized in naval missions to the Far East. As a short, flute-sterned vessel, it was bestowed with a ketch rig, but lacking a foremast, two mortars could then be placed onto the deck of the ship with a clear line of fire. The sail area of this vessel was rather limited, but this problem was overcome by increasing the mainmast height and the size of the mainsail. 191

jennifer ferng Unlike the Dutch, French confidence with their armies on land did not necessarily translate well to the vast terrain of the open seas. Martine Acerra has maintained that the “double littoral, Atlantic and Mediterranean” o∑ered France several geographic advantages and contact with complementary maritime cultures like those of Spain.¤› Harshly denounced by monarch Philippe Auguste, he decreed in his own words that “les Français connaissent mal la voie de mer” [the French know little about the sea]. This royal pronouncement, however, did not deter naval minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert from later bolstering the maritime capacity of the French Empire, as he desired to expand the initial concepts propounded by Cardinal Richelieu under Louis XIII.¤fi In collaboration with Le Roux d’Infreville, commissioner of the French navy, Colbert undertook a modest accounting of the naval fleet under his command—specifically, the number of ships that could be taken to war or used for trade, the type of tra≈c e∑ectuated, names of captains and proprietors, types of ships, and their origins and weight. This sweeping inquiry, complete with useful tools, was finalized in the following year under the title Les ports, havres et rivières navigables de Normandie dans l’enquête des amirautés de 1665, which described a small portion of the French littoral, estuaries, islands, navigable rivers, and tidal movements. The French navy made sure to consistently maintain a limited fleet of fast ships with strong endurance throughout the century. Many existing typologies of naval vessels across Western Europe were often recycled into newer classes of warships; in essence, these ship conversions as a method of technological revisioning were intended to rebuild the strength of a fleet without spending a fortune. Financial restrictions imposed upon the French flotilla caused by the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years’ War required that the French navy invent far more pecuniary solutions that addressed British incursions aimed at Dunkirk. The rebuilding of older ships into newer models, moreover, was vital to the stabilized maintenance of a national fleet, which only numbered 135 vessels in 1680. Intendant Colbert nurtured pedagogical advancements through ship design and the discovery of a theory of ship construction. Even naval engineer Bernard Renau d’Elissagaray participated, publishing his e∑orts on the mechanical principles of ship handling.¤fl In this same year, the mortar-armed bomb vessel conceived by d’Elissagaray took the shape of a two-masted craft, armed with two large mortars and a few light guns. Most e∑ective during the bombardment of Algiers by the French in 1682, the 192

infernal machines galiote à bombes, inspired by the Dutch galliot, was initially conceived as an e∑ective weapon against the North African corsairs, and yet, very few methods of fighting battles were developed along with it. Measuring between sixty to seventy feet long, it typically displaced around eight to nine feet of water. With its newfound ability to throw explosive shells into fortified cities, it was regarded as a powerful naval instrument of warfare, and this new type of ship quickly spread to other sea powers across Europe. English and Dutch navies between 1694 and 1695 built or converted a limited number of bomb vessels for attacks against French Channel ports, and in 1700, they, along with Swedish allies, attempted an initial bombardment of Copenhagen, Denmark. Well-trained artillerists often handled specialized high-trajectory weaponry of this variety, and typically, no earnest attempts were made to fire shells from low-lying anti-ship guns. During ongoing confrontations with enemy vessels, shells were regarded as quite dangerous since crewmen had to handle them under conditions of extreme duress, which may have caused them to explode prematurely, setting the crew’s own vessel on fire. Not until the advent of the Napoleonic Wars did the French navy begin to feel the impact of improved British solid-shot artillery. French espionage in the early half of the eighteenth century injected an additional element of international rivalry into the competitive race to perfect the bomb vessel. Industrial spy Blaise-Joseph Ollivier was sent by the French government to scrutinize the English navy to gain useful information on their shipbuilding methods. His exhaustive report from 1737, which detailed his observations of the British and Dutch dockyards, commented on the design, fitting, and working practices of their fleets. These descriptions encompassed the treatment of timber supplies, the workforce, and the state of the dockyards themselves. He noted that a common English method of timber preservation involved storing the wood in deep seawater to prevent the sap in the wood from fermenting.¤‡

British Conversions In parallel, both France and Britain labored intensely to redevelop their naval vessels as modern contrivances, but the British admiralty succeeded in responding immediately to the ongoing conditions surrounding 193

jennifer ferng eighteenth-century warfare. Definitive proof of the high quality of French naval vessels, as historian James Pritchard asserted, centered on “the British practice of sometimes converting prizes into flagships and designating particular vessels as models on drafts of English ships.”¤° Foreign techniques were often introduced into French arsenals from exotic places such as the Barbary Coast, Barcelona, and Malta, but these ideas generated by foreign craftsmen, carpenters, anchor foragers, ropemakers, and salvage operators, provide little explanation of the French success in shipbuilding.¤· Warship attributes—such as speed, stability, lightness, durability, seaworthiness, and firepower— could only be produced at the expense of each other.‹‚ The realization of superior craftsmanship, Pritchard imagined, was due to processes such as institutionalization and professionalization. Early e∑orts were made continually to extract shipbuilders’ secrets from assorted treatises and books. For instance, while Father George Fournier’s Hydrographie (1643) only printed useful recipes for tracing ship patterns, more importantly, texts like Nicolas Aubin’s Dictionnaire de la marine (1702) assembled the collective contributions of those who tried to “pry loose shipwrights’ skills and transform their secrets to rationally apprehensible knowledge.”‹⁄ Engineering specifications dictated a common class of vessel without yielding the entire design to a united set of dimensions. One of the early British prototypes, Salamander, built by Robert Lee, was launched from the royal dockyard at Chatham in 1687 (Figure 8.2), followed soon after by the Firedrake and the converted Portsmouth. Bomb vessels were regarded as an expensive investment, and the admiralty intended to use them at first as cruisers. Ironically, it would take a Frenchman to make the British dream a feasible reality. Jean Fournier as an artillery expertturned-designer postulated that it was impossible to cut the necessary extra ports in the sides of the vessel without weakening its structural members; removing mortars and the forecastle would not lighten the ship very much. Fournier’s 1693 adaptations, focused on smaller craft with the same amount of firepower, improved four purpose-built bomb vessels: the Firedrake, the Serpent, the Mortar at Chatham, and the Granado (Figure 8.3). From 1700 to 1745, the new ships actually masqueraded as older vessels that were perpetually being rebuilt. When an old ship was broken up, its serviceable remains from the hull were scavenged for a design for a new ship maintained by financial funds earmarked for naval 194

Figure 8.2. Salamander, 1730.

Figure 8.3. Granado, 1742.

infernal machines repairs. Due to economic austerity, the number of overall vessels never expanded rapidly, nor were new nautical designs ever introduced. British building programs for naval architecture commenced in 1695, when all but one ship was constructed entirely on the River Thames. Historians have observed that these concentrated programs of construction highlighted given technical specifications of the bomb vessel that were improved in forthcoming years. For example, early French vessels possessed two forward pointing mortars fixed side by side on the foredeck of the ship. In order to aim these weapons, the ship was rotated by hauling in the spring anchor. British shipwrights later copied this exact design by replacing the forward-facing mortars with ones mounted on rotating platforms, aligned on the centerline of the ship. These mechanical elements, in turn, were supported by strong internal structures that transferred firing forces to the hull. Among the cohort of early bomb vessels, the Basilisk, Blast, Carcass, Comet, Dreadful, Furnace, Thunder, Serpent, and Granado were christened with descriptive names inspired by volcanoes or dramatic expressions associated with explosions.‹¤ In this cadre of ships, significant modifications were made that shaped the bomb vessel for the remainder of the eighteenth century. The general length and width of the ship was increased, the rig was improved, and the mainmast was moved forward. E∑ects of these changes were to provide additional space for the after mortar, granting it a longer arc of fire.‹‹ This resulting wellbalanced rig improved the vessel’s overall sailing performance, and its dimensions and capabilities enhanced its integration with the rest of the British fleet. British innovations to bomb vessel design converged on traversing mounting, where the two mortars were placed along the centerline of the ship, with the ketch’s mainmast situated nearer midship for a more balanced rig. This modification made far more economical use of the ship’s length, while requiring less breadth because the mortars were no longer side by side, allowing the vessel’s hull dimensions to be reduced. From 1700 to 1739, the War of Spanish Succession saw greater usage of the bomb vessel but on a much reduced scale. They were often exploited in groups of two or three coupled together, sailing alongside larger vessels that carried greater numbers of troops and more weaponry. The hull and the overall dimensions of the ketch did not change, but the use of the vessel in action was eventually refined. Bronze ordnance, it was soon learned, tended to melt out of shape 197

jennifer ferng when it was overfired, apparently caused by a casing default. Each mortar weighed between four and five tons, cast into one piece. Every six or seven minutes, a mortar could be discharged at a nearby ship; thus bombardments were considered staccato a∑airs with bomb vessels moving in and out of action. A minor dinghy like a tender often accompanied bomb vessels, carrying the bulk of the ammunition as well as the o≈cers in charge of the mortars. During wartime skirmishes, bomb ketches came to be escorted by substantial frigates that would protect them from damaging incursions by smaller, faster vessels. Their strategic use was often closely coordinated with joint expeditions of land troops already based on shore. Ensuing British building programs in 1740 re-examined the e∑ects of implementing a smaller-sized mortar. The larger portion of the sail area could be shifted forward, and the size of the headsails could be reduced and mainmast shortened. This modification greatly reduced the possibility of accidental damage to the main and mizzen shrouds. On board the ships, howitzers, which were lighter weapons than mortars, could consequentially be elevated far more easily. In 1758, other design modifications were made with substantial e∑ects: the steering wheel superseded the less manageable tiller; the windlass replaced one set of riding bitts under the forecastle; and a capstan was fitted abaft the ten-inch mortar. Looking closely at a sectional drawing of the Granado, the bomb vessel was rebuilt with salvaged parts in 1742 and renamed for its earlier predecessor from 1694. The Granado’s timbers were composed of a combination of elm, oak, deadwood, and compass oak, selected to withstand the violent recoil of the mortars on board. Elm was chosen for its durability when immersed in seawater for long periods of time and its irregular grain pattern. The bottom planking of the ship measured around two to three inches thick, with braced boards forming the foundation below the main wale.‹› The ship’s compartments were arranged carefully around the position of the two mortar platforms that occupied the center areas below deck. The shell room and mortar pit formed an integral part of the ship’s structure. Oak longitudinal beams were erected with three members at the base and three at the top. Between these members, eighteen square pillars were fashioned with a “tenon at the head and the heel,” allowing space for tiered racks to hold shells between the pillars.‹fi This centered position also permitted the mortars to balance the center point of the ship. Bomb vessels like the Granado 198

infernal machines did not spend their entire period of use as a single type of maritime craft, but more often, were converted into sloops, bearing minor arms like muskets, pistols, swords, and bayonets.‹fl In comparison, the 1744 drawing of the Serpent bomb vessel exhibits a clearer top-down view of the ship with a central placement of the mortars. Rather large in width, the two mortars were defined by their weight but also by their radial circumference. They remained in the back two-thirds of the vessel, evenly spaced in plan (Figure 8.4). There were slight di∑erences between the Granado, Serpent, and Vesuvius, for instance, that can be seen in the architectural section—mainly, the placement of the mortars dictated how much space was left at the front of the ship for stairs and other spaces for the crew (Figure 8.5). These subtle spatial alterations o∑er some evidence of the conversions adopted by the British navy to provide the mortars on the bomb vessel with a clear target trajectory. In o∑setting the weight of the mortars, the remaining surplus of men, provisions, cordage, ordnance, and draught of water had to be taken into strict account. Bomb vessel Thunder from 1759 stocked a mix of personnel and victual stores when departing from Black Stakes, Medway, on July 27, 1759, specifically: water in the ground tier; beer in the second tier; and coal, wood, candles, bricks, stone, ironwork, lead, iron ballast, and shingle ballast, as well as several kinds of round shot and grape shot.‹‡ By the 1770s, British vessels of this type were designed as fully rigged ships with three masts (forward rigging, for example, was made from chain-link to protect against muzzle blasts). Mortars were the only kind of naval armament to fire explosive shells rather than employing solid shot. It was considered dangerous to store large amounts of stocked ammunition on board a vessel itself. Moored in position with springs on their cables, bomb vessels trained their mortars to fire upon the desired bearing, absorbing the recoil after a shot was launched. At the end of the century, most bomb vessels were fitted with improved mortar capabilities carrying twelve- or eighteenpound shells.‹° In the British navy, mortars planted on bomb vessels were manned and operated by the Royal Marine Artillery until 1804. Bomb ketches were occasionally employed by the British admiralty to search for the Northwest Passage and explore the Arctic and Antarctica. Considered rather sturdy, these particular naval vessels contained a sti∑ened deck complete with heavy beam bridges, built to withstand the pressure of ice 199

Figure 8.4. Serpent, 1742.

Figure 8.5. Vesuvius, 1776.

Figure 8.6. Battle of Copenhagen, April 2nd, 1801.

infernal machines when stuck in frozen waters. Their military e≈ciency was attained during the second bombardment of Copenhagen on September 2, 1807. British naval forces sent by George Canning to the island of Zealand, supported by Admiral James Gambier’s fleet that was ushered by bomb vessels, sailed up the sound located between Copenhagen and Sweden. Illustrated in Clowes’s history of the Royal Navy, the bomb vessels were positioned carefully outside of the British line of ships, intending to cast their shells over their participating compatriots (Figure 8.6). In this maneuver, British troops intended to capture the Trekroner batteries located on land and guarded by the Danish fleet.‹·

Technological Revisioning Early modern naval shipbuilding, as historian Jan Glete pointed out, has su∑ered from scant attention by architectural historians and historians alike. There is a general scarcity of relevant source materials such as drawings, models, and detailed accounts of ships and shipbuilding methods. Shipbuilding was based mainly on tacit knowledge, or skills and techniques passed on through oral rather than written means. But with the advent of modern navies, more documentation became widely available. Interactions between technology, economy, and the development of state navies, as well as the private use of violence at sea has brought scholarship on this subject to fruition.›‚ Closer studies of warship designs reveal that these vessels possessed national characteristics that correlated to di∑erent strategic doctrines. Technical developments can be perceived as part of neither an autonomous nor automatic process external to the governmental institutions that controlled marine defense, but rather, as part of a longer sequence of political events based on experiments directly related to the manner in which navies fought wars. Glete avowed that disparate “requirements tested the ingenuity of the designer and economic considerations forced him to not spend more than was absolutely necessary to achieve a level of given quality.”›⁄ Bomb vessels embodied a form of nautical engineering that employed a high degree of experimentation, but nevertheless, even they possessed their share of restricted influence, given their economic limitations. The eventual development of naval guns, which could be trained and elevated irrespective of a ship’s course, eventually made these vessels completely obsolete. Naval architecture, in fact, developed in response 203

jennifer ferng to a bureaucratic need by naval administrators to exert greater control over ship constructors and to standardize the ship-building process. The systematic use of ship theory made sense only within bureaucratic organizations established for naval construction, which entailed a strong central control of design and a system of professional formation that enabled constructors and engineers to carry out given calculations. Insistent demands by naval administrators for theoretical calculations can be seen as the next step that moved beyond their commitment to scaled models and drafted plans. Further improvements in details of the bomb vessel—copper sheathing applied to ship hulls to increase speed, diagonal framing to increase longitudinal strength, and protective enclosed bow and stern structures—endured as lasting modifications from 1775 to 1840, well into the nineteenth century.›¤ More importantly, maritime technologies channeled aesthetic choices into cultural and political solutions that allowed European empires to conquer foreign territory. Contemporary conceptions surrounding innovation tend to privilege the novelty behind an idea, and yet, in the early modern era, the transference and copying of ideas across time engendered a transnational naval architecture produced from the pragmatic conditions under which technology labors.›‹ Treating technical dimensions of architecture as a legitimate site for historical inquiry, as I see it, positions bomb vessels as critical paradigms of economic and political necessity, but also as challenging exemplars of design ingenuity. The infernal machines that once began as mere imitations of the Dutch galjoot revolutionized into their own class of naval vessel, capable of fiery destruction on land or at sea. Bomb vessels continued to be used throughout the Napoleonic Wars, and with the invention of HenriJoseph Paixhans’s shell-firing gun, naval architecture had to undergo yet another advancement in ship design. Even more modern variations of the bomb vessel continued to persevere as monitors, or ironclad warships, bearing a single large-bore turret gun that assaulted coastal installations during World War II.›› In reviving Forfait’s image of the composite machine, the bomb vessel throughout all of its iterations represented a true piece of mechanical design that guaranteed technology would be deprived of neither durability nor utility. 001 William Emerson, The Art of Mechanics: Explaining and Demonstrating the General Laws of Motion (London: Printed for G. Robinson, 1773), v. Emerson proposed that the instruments essential for shipbuilding are akin to those employed in architecture.

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infernal machines 002 Refer to one of many scholarly research center publications focused on transatlantic exchanges in history, such as David Plouviez, La Marine française et ses reseaux économiques au XIIIe siècle (Paris: Indes Savantes, 2014). See the Research Centre for Atlantic and International History at https://www.crhia.fr/en /introducing-crhia. See also Werner F. Y. Scheltjens, “The Changing Geography of Demand for Dutch Maritime Transport in the Eighteenth Century,” Histoire et Mesure 27, no. 2, VARIA (2012): 3–47. 003 Matthew Norton, “Temporality, Isolation, and Violence in the Early Modern English Maritime World,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 48, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 37–66, 39. 004 William H. German, “The Profession of Naval Architecture,” Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts 126, no. 5258 (January 1978): 65–79 (66). 005 Ibid. Refer also to David Lyon, The Sailing Navy List: All the Ships of the Royal Navy—Built, Purchased, and Captured—1688–1860 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1993). 006 James Pritchard, “From Shipwright to Naval Constructor: The Professionalization of 18th-Century French Naval Shipbuilders,” Technology and Culture 28, no. 1 (January 1987): 1–25. 007 Ibid., 67. N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Collins, 1986); Rodger, “Image and Reality in Eighteenth-Century Naval Tactics,” The Mariner’s Mirror 89 (2003): 280–96. 008 L. Denoix, “Charpentiers, constructeurs ingénieurs de vaisseaux,” Académie de Marine, 1954–1955 1: 5–18. With a traditional emphasis on scientific training, Marine Acerra, “Les Constructeurs de la marine, XVII–XVIIIIe siècles,” Revue historique 273 (1985): 283–304. 009 Didier Neuville, État sommaire des archives de la marine antérieurs à la Revolution (Paris: L. Baudoin, 1898), 396. 010 Robert Gardiner, “Frigate Design in the 18th Century,” Warship: A Quarterly Journal of Warship History no. 12 (1979): 85. 011 Jonathan Grant, “Rethinking the Ottoman ‘Decline’: Military Technology Di∑usion in the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” Journal of World History 10, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 179–201. The Ottomans were slow to transition from using galleys to galleons. See also Keith Kruse, Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 30–31. 012 Pierre Alexandre-Laurent Forfait, Traité élémentaire de la mâture des vaisseaux à l’usage des élèves de la marine (Paris: Clousier, 1788). 013 David McGee, “From Craftsmanship to Draftsmanship: Naval Architecture and the Three Traditions of Early Modern Design,” Technology and Culture 40, no. 2 (April 1999): 210. 014 Ibid., 213. 015 Ibid., 235. 016 João Baptista Lavanha, Livro Primeiro da Architectura Naval (Lisboa: Academia di Marinha, 1610). 017 Larrie D. Ferreiro, “Pierre Bouguer and the Solid of Least Resistance,” Revue

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jennifer ferng d’histoire des sciences 63, no. 1 (janvier–juin 2010): 100. Refer also to Ferreiro’s Ships and Science: The Birth of Naval Architecture in the Scientific Revolution, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 018 Pierre Bouguer, Traité du navire, de sa construction, et de ses mouvemens (Paris: Chez Jombert, 1751), 27. 019 Mario Carpo, “Drawing with Numbers: Geometry and Numeracy in Early Modern Architectural Design,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 62, no. 4 (December 2003): 448–69. 020 Jacques Guillerme, Hélène Vérin, and Stephen Sartarelli, “The Archaeology of Section,” Perspecta 25 (1989): 240. 021 Ibid. 022 Ibid., 250. The construction of naval architecture prompted further debates on how the physical qualities of materials such as timber were to be handled by builders and carpenters. 0230Engel Sluiter, “Dutch Maritime Power and the Colonial Status Quo, 1585– 1641,” Pacific Historical Review 11, no. 1 (March 1942): 29–41. Refer also to the tensions between the openness of Dutch public knowledge and individual contracts devoted to craft secrecy; see Karel Davids, “Public Knowledge and Common Secrets: Secrecy and its Limits in the Early Modern Netherlands,” Early Science and Medicine 10, no. 3 (2005): 411–27. 024 Martine Acerra and André Zysberg, L’essor des marines de guerre européennes, 1680–1790 (Paris: Sedes, 1997), 13, 25. Eric Rieth, “A Similar Atlantic and Mediterranean Ship Design Method: The Case of the French Royal Docklands at the End of the XVIIth Century,” in Shipbuilding Practice and Ship Design Methods from the Renaissance to the 18th Century, eds. Horst Nowacki and Matteo Valleriani, preprint 245 (Berlin: Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte, 2003), 79–85 (80). 025 Eric Rieth, “A Similar Atlantic and Mediterranean Ship Design Method: the Case of the French Royal Docklands at the End of the XVIIth Century” in Shipbuilding Practice and Ship Design Methods from the Renaissance to the 18th Century, eds. Horst Nowacki and Matteo Valleriani, preprint 245 (Berlin: Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftgeschichte, 2003), 79-85, 80; David Plouviez, “The maintenance, repair and construction of ships in the French Empire during the eighteenth century,” International Journal of Maritime History, vol. 31, no. 3 (2019), 590-611. 026 René Mémain, La marine de guerre sous Louis XIV, le materiel, Rochefort, arsenal modèle de Colbert (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1937), 641–731, and Bernard Renau d’Elissagaray, De la Théorie de la manoeuvre des vaisseaux (Paris, 1689). Refer to Michel Depeyre, Tactiques et stratégies navales de la France et du Royaume Uni de 1690 à 1815 (Paris: Economica, Bibliothèque Stratégique, 1998); Martine Acerra and Jean Meyer, Marines et révolution (Rennes: Editions Ouest- France, 1988), and Martine Acerra, José Merino, and Jean Meyer, Les Marines de guerres européennes: XVIIème-XVIIIème siècles (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1998). 027 Blaise Joseph Ollivier, 18th Century Shipbuilding: Remarks on the Navy of the English and the Dutch in 1737 (Rotherfield: East Sussex, 1992).

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Pritchard, “From Shipwright to Naval Constructor,” 1. Ibid., 8. Gardiner, “Frigate Design in the 18th Century,” 275. Pritchard, “From Shipwright to Naval Constructor,” 9. Navy Board to the Admiralty, ADM 354/117/48, National Archives, London. Letter dated February 23, 1743, “To the Secretary of the Admiralty. Proposal to name the Bomb vessels now building at Ipswich by John Barnard, Granado, at Blackwall by Philip Perry, the Fire Drake and Mortar, at Limehouse, by Thomas Snelgrove, the Serpent and by Messrs. Grenville and Company, the Terror and at Rotherhithe by James Taylor, the Comet, in order to appoint carpenters to them.” Peter Goodwin, The Bomb Vessel Granado 1742 (London: Conway Maritime Press Limited, 1989), 8. Built by John Barnard at Ipswich, the Granado possessed a full square stern, suggesting that it was intended to be transformed into a sloop. Goodwin doubts this theory and includes many specific dimensions of the bomb vessels constructed during the same time as the Granado. Ibid., 12. See Table 11: Cost Comparisons between Converted and PurposeBuilt Bomb Vessels, in Chris Ware’s The Bomb Vessel: Shore Bombardment Ships in the Age of Sail (London: Conway Maritime Press Limited, 1994). Goodwin, The Bomb Vessel Granado 1742, 13. See page 16 for detailed descriptions of the form and physical composition of a mortar, typically a shell filled with ten pounds and four ounces of powder matched with a beech or willow fuse, added with saltpeter, sulphur, and finely ground powder. Maximum range with the mortar elevated at forty-five degrees was 4,100 yards. ADM 95/65 (PRO), “Ships. Draught and qualities,” 1756–1758, National Archives UK. ADM 95/66 letter 17, “Ships. Draught and qualities,” 1756–1758, National Archives UK. Goodwin, The Bomb Vessel Granado 1742, 9. See Brian Tunstall, Naval Warfare in the Age of Sail: The Evolution of Fighting Tactics, 1650–1815 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1990). Known as Trekroner Søfort (or Three Crowns), this fortification was located at the entrance to Copenhagen Harbor and served as an important line of defense during the Battle of Copenhagen (1801). On technological developments and scientific collections, see Richard Dunn, “Material Culture in the History of Science: Case Studies from the National Maritime Museum,” British Journal for the History of Science 42, no. 1 (March 2009): 31–33. Jan Glete, Naval History 1500–1680 (2005; Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). Refer also to Glete, Warships, Navies and State Building in Europe and America, 1500–1866 (Stockholm: Almquist & Wiksell International, 1993), 182. Refer also to Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2002). See C. S. Forester, The Commodore (London: Michael Joseph, 1945) in the

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jennifer ferng Horatio Hornblower series that showcased fictional episodes of bomb vessels in action around Cape Arcona. The character Hornblower follows similar military strategic procedures that illustrate how mortars were anchored, positioned, and adjusted during o∑ensive maneuvers. Many of Forester’s fictitious bomb vessels were coincidentally named like those belonging to the British Royal Navy. 043 Pamela O. Long, “The Craft of Premodern European History of Technology: Past and Future Practice,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 3 (July 2010): 698–714. 044 Goodwin, The Bomb Vessel Granado 1742, 9. Among hobbyists and academics, maritime studies and naval architecture continue to persist as intellectual areas of study that cross the disciplines of architecture, engineering, and history.

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Notes on Contributors

Melanie Cooper is Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide, where she received her PhD in Art History in 2017. The focus of her research concerns representations of gender and mythology in eighteenthcentury fine art and visual culture. With a growing fascination for histories of censorship and iconoclasm, she currently serves as state representative of South Australia for AAANZ (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand) and sometimes writes on contemporary art for exhibition catalogues and online publications including Fine Print. Jennifer Ferng is Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Postgraduate Coordinator at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD in history, theory, and criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her M.Arch from Princeton University. Her research interests include European architecture and the earth sciences during the long eighteenth century. She is coeditor of the volume Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (2021). Her next book explores how early modern concepts of architecture and environment set the stage for contemporary concerns regarding climate change and sustainability. Jessica L. Fripp is Associate Professor of Art History at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses on the art and visual culture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Her research focuses on the interaction between evolving conceptions of social relationships and the production of visual and material culture in eighteenth-century France. She is coeditor of Artistes, savants et amateurs: art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715–1815) (2016) and author of Portraiture and Friendship in Enlightenment France (University of Delaware Press, 2020). Matthew Martin is Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship at the University of Melbourne. He was formerly curator of International Decorative Arts and Antiquities at the National Gallery of Victoria and Director of Studies in the Melbourne College of Divinity. His research interests include European porcelain and sculptural aesthetics in the eighteenth

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contributors century, collecting history, and the role of confessional identity in artists’ networks of the early modern period. His most recent publication is “Porcelain and Power: The Meaning of Porcelain in Ancien Régime France,” in Enchanted Isles, Fatal Shores: Living Versailles, eds. Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington (2020). David Maskill was Senior Lecturer in Art History in the School of English, Film, Theatre, Media and Communication, and Art History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, from 1993 to 2019. His research interests are eighteenth-century French art and the history of prints. He has published articles on aspects of French eighteenth-century printmaking in Print Quarterly and on André Rouquet in Journal18. He is currently an art consultant for Webb’s auction house. Jennifer Milam is Professor and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Newcastle. As an interdisciplinary scholar, her research interests include rococo art, patronage, curatorial studies, museum practice, intellectual history, and garden design. Her books on rococo art include Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (2011), Fragonard’s Playful Paintings (2007), and an edited collection, Women, Art and the Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2003). Her articles have appeared in The Art Bulletin, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Curator: The Museum Journal, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Art History, and The Burlington Magazine. Milam’s current projects focus on issues of cosmopolitan ideals and national identity in garden design, and the cultural history of plants and nature during the Enlightenment. Nicola Parsons is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney. Her research is focused on eighteenth-century literature and cultural history. She is especially interested in reading practices and forms of literary sociability. Her first book, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (2009), concentrates on texts by Delarivier Manley, Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Edmund Curll, and Jane Barker and shows how gossip modeled an interpretative strategy that shaped readers’ participation in both literary culture and public debates. She has published articles on Manley, Barker, and Queen Anne's correspondence with the Duchess of Marlborough. Jessica Priebe is Lecturer in Art History at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia. She is a former Junior Research Fellow in Enlightenment Studies with the Sydney Intellectual History Network at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include collecting and museum practice in the long eighteenth century and the role of European porcelain in contemporary

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contributors Caribbean visual and material culture. She has published essays in the Journal of the History of Collections, British Art Studies, PMC Notes, Un Abrégé du Monde: Savoirs et Collections autour de Dezallier d'Argenville, and Sea Currents: Art, Science and the Commodification of the Ocean World in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming). She is the author of François Boucher and the Art of Collecting in Eighteenth-Century France (2021). Wiebke Windorf is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Art History at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany, where she received her PhD with a dissertation on questions of truth and fiction in history paintings in Baroque Rome, and also received her habilitation with a thesis on the royal funerary monument as a site of innovation and discourse under Louis XV. After serving as visiting professor at the universities of Duisburg-Essen, Düsseldorf, and Bochum, since April 2021, she has been examining early modern Parisian sacred sculpture. She has coedited volumes on truth and verisimilitude (2010), liminal phenomena in the arts (2017), inventions and opportunities in art (2019), funerary sculpture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France (2021), and sacred space in the Enlightenment (2021).

211

Index

American garden design, 6–7, 83–85, 97–100, 107 Anano∑, Alexandre, 32 Andachtsbilder, 71 Anne, Queen of Austria, 70 Antigallican Society, 65 Antipodes, the, 166–67. See also Australia Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 100 Architectura Navalis (Furttenbach), 190 Architecture Françoise (Blondel), 36 Ariés, Philippe, 136, 137 aristocratic culture: and European porcelain, 60; European, 60 art and ideas. See visibility and ideas art making, 2–3, 4 art, 2, 3, 4; in relation to nature (Boucher), 49–50 Artist Inspired by Venus, The (Boucher), 30, 31, 52 artist, amateur, 169, 175 artworks, meaning of, 1–2, conveying ideas, 6. See also visibility and ideas Attributes of the Arts and Their Rewards, The (Jean-Siméon Chardin), 15, 16 Aubin, Nicolas, Dictionnaire de la marine, 194 Australia, 167, 168

Illustrations are in italics. Only reproduced art works are indexed by title as well as by artist name. Aboriginal Australians, 173, names of, 174, 176 Abrantès, Duchesse d’, 117 Académie de Saint Luc, 35 Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 31, 32. See also French Academy Acerra, Martine, 192 Ackermann, Rudolph, 168–69 Adams, John, 84, 85 aesthetics: eighteenth-century, 2, history of, 6 aging, women, 7, 111–28; as exile, 111; pretending to be younger, 112, 110, 117; stereotypes of; 112; portraits of, 112; physical signs of, 112, 116, 117; as cultural construction, 112–13; invisibility of, 117–19 Alberti, Leon Battista, 147, 191 Album of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, 169 Algardi, Alessandro, The Meeting between St. Leo the Great and Attila, 149, 150 Allais, Pierre, Madame Geo∑rin, 117, 122, 118

213

index 198; British and French, 193-94; craftsmanship of, 186; design of, 186–87, 188, 189, 190, 204; drawings (sections and plans) for, 189–91; Dutch and French, 191–93; e≈ciency of, 186, 189; fictional, 207–8n42; Granado, 194, 196, 197, 198–99, 207n33; improvements to, 192, 194, 198; as machines, 188; mechanical parts of, 187; Mortar, 194; mortars in, 194, 197, 198-99; origins of, 191; rebuilding and conversion of, 193–94; Salamander, 194, 195; Serpent, 194, 197, 199, 200; Thunder, 197, 199; Vesuvius, 199, 201. See also galjoots, galiote à bombes, bomb ketches Bonnac, marquis de, 49 Botet, Marie-Catherine, 127 Bouchardon, Edmé, 14, 137 Boucher, François, 6, 31–57: apartment on rue de Richelieu, 33; as artist and collector, 32, 36, 52; artistic inspiration, 31, 40, 44, 46, 53; classical motifs of, 42; as a designer and decorator, 38–39; as host, 47; interest in Venus as subject, 31; move to the Louvre, 32–36; natural history cabinet of, 46–52; status of, 32, 36; studio apartment at the Louvre, 31–32, 52. See also following two entries Boucher, François, collection of, 32, 36: agrarian objects, 43; Asian porcelain, 40; butterflies, 38; ceremonial arms and instruments, 49; classification of, 49; as decoration and inspiration, 46; as extension of artistic practice, 32, 52; fine art, 39; French gilt mounts, 40; furniture, 38; gemstones, 38;

Aved, André-Joseph, 14, 27n9; attempts to secure a Louvre logement, 14; probate inventory of, 14; portrait of Madame Crozat, 123 Aveline, Pierre, The Bird Trap, 43 Awabakal people, 173, 174, 182n69; brothers (“Dick” and “Jack”), 170–71 Bailey, Colin, 32, 36 Baker, Matthew, 186 Banier, Antoine, Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History, 161 Baptist, Edward, The Half Has Never Been Told, 82 Barbé-Marbois, François, 79 Baroque, the, 152 Battle of Copenhagen, map of the, 202 Beauregard, Joseph-Henri Costa de, 40, 47, 49 beauty, concept of, 1 Bell, Esther, 125 Berchem, Nicolæs, A Man and a Youth Ploughing with Oxen, 39 Bergeret de Grancourt, Pierre Jacques Onésime, 46 Bernard, Jean Frédéric, Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, 160, 165–66 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 136, 141, Funerary Monument to Pope Urban VIII, 141; Funerary Monument to the Countess Matilda of Canossa, 142 Blondel, Jacques-François, Architecture Françoise, 36, 125 bomb ketches, 8, 185, 188, 197–98, 199. See also bomb vessels bomb vessels (galjoots, galiote à bombes, bomb ketches), 185–204: adaptations/modifications of, 185, 187, 189, 192–93, 194, 197,

214

index caricature, 172 Carpo, Mario, 191 Casanova, Giacomo, 123 Catalogue de l’oeuvre grave de et d’aprés Ch Coypel, 127 Cathelin, Louis-Jacques (after Jean-Marc Nattier), Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 24, 25 Catherine the Great, 15 Catholic art, 68 Catholic elite in England, 60, 72 Catholicism, French, 59 Cayeux, Philippe, 39 Chardin, Jean-Siméon, 15, The Attributes of the Arts and Their Rewards, 15, 16, 17, 21; income, 28n20, 28n21 Charles Edward Stuart, Prince, 65 Cheetham, Mark, 59 Chelsea Porcelain Factory, 6, 59–73: anti-Gallicanism of, 64, 65, 66, 73; aristocratic and popular appeal of, 61; British market for, 62, 64, 72, 73; and Catholics, 65; as competitor to Meissen and Vincennes-Sèvres factories, 60; cosmopolitanism of, 66, 73; devotional images by, 59, 60, 66, 69, 71, 72; as imitator of Asian and Continental porcelain, 62, 64; Gold Anchor period, 69, 72; link to French monuments, 71; non-English sta∑ of, 61, 62, 72; Pietà, 67, 70; Pietà groups, 72; as “Protestant”, 64, 66; Red Anchor period, 68; The Vırgin and Child, 58, 66, 70. See also porcelain “China ware”, 75n15 Chinese Botanist (Boucher), 45 Chrisman-Campbell, Kimberly, 116 Christian IV, duke of Zweibrücken, 47 Christianity, 164, 167, 173, 178

low relief and freestanding figures, 40; minerals and corals, 47; models and toys, 43; seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish cabinet pictures, 39; shells, 49, 52; as source of motifs, 43; and studio practice, 36, 40, 41, 44, 46, 52; vases; 40, 42–49 Boucher, François, works by: The Artist Inspired by Venus (the Lille drawing), 30, 31; Chinese Botanist, 45; The Chinese Garden, 42; Estaminet, 39; Fire, 42, 44; Landscape with a Watermill, 43; Le Petit Chariot, 43; Livre de vases, 42; portrait of second wife (presumed), 46; Recueil de diverse figures chinoises du cabinet de François Boucher peintre du roi dessinées et gravées par lui-même, 43; Triumph of Venus, 50, 51, 52; Winter, 52 Bouchet, Claude-André (after François Boucher), Design for a Vase, 41 Bouguer, Pierre, Traité du navire, 190, 191 Bret (de Dijon), Antoine, 46, 49 Bretagne, duc de, 165 Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Vırginia, A (Hariot), 163 British art, 3; as distinct from French, 59 British identity, as Protestant, 59, as Catholic, 60, 72 British navy: Royal Marine Artillery, 199 British porcelain. See under porcelain Brown, C. Allan, 90 Bry, Theodore de, 162 Bryson, Norman, 4 Burigon (“Jack”), 170–71

215

index Coustou, Guillaume (the younger), 137 Coustou, Guillaume (the elder), 32 Coustou, Nicholas, 66, 69; Pietà, 70 Coypel, Antoine (father of CharlesAntoine), 35 Coypel, Charles(-Antoine), 28n21, 33, 35, 110, 112, 116, 126, 127; La Folie pare la decrepitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse, 112, 124, 125; La Triomphe de la Raison, 124 Cross-Section of the Grand Gallery and the Lodgings Below (François II d’Orbay), 19 Crozat, Pierre, 39 Cutts, Mary, 96

circuit walks, 97–98, 106n34–36; as means of surveying property, 98–100 civilization and savagery, perceptions of, 159–78 Clermont, Mademoiselle de, 124–25, Clodion, 40 Cochin, Charles-Nicholas, 15, 25, 113, 115, 116, 117 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, Les ports, havres et rivières navigables de Normandie dans l’enquête des amirautés de 1665, 192 collecting, as an artistic and intellectual activity, 39 Colley, Linda, 59, 73 colonization, 167, 178 Columbus, Christopher, 166 convict artists, 170 Cook, James (captain), 171 copy, the. See under mimesis Cornelia and Ellen (Misses Randolph, Je∑erson’s granddaughters), 90, 101, 102–3 Correspondance littéraire, 116 cosmopolitanism, 6, 66, 73, 100; and national identity, 84; and Poplar Forest, 85, 103. See also under nationalism costume. See dress Counter-Reformation: art in eighteenth-century British collections, 66; devotional imagery for British market, 59, 66, 72; iconography, 69; and religious art in England, 59, 68–70, 72; Spanish and Flemish art of, 70. See also Chelsea Porcelain Factory Cour Carrée (Square Court, the Louvre), 35, 36; Boucher’s apartment in, 33; Coypel’s rooms in, 33, 35

d’Alembert, Jean le Rond, 119 d’Infreville, Le Roux, 192 d’Orbay, François II, Cross-Section of the Grand Gallery and the Lodgings Below, 17, 19 Danish Academy, 21 Darwin, Charles, The Origin of the Species, 167 Death (personified), 139, 141 death, 7, collective attitudes toward, 135, 136, 137, 152; individualistic ideas toward, 135; as a skeleton, 141 Demarteau, Gilles, engraving after Boucher, 43; drawing of Geo∑rin (after Charles Nicolas II Cochin), 115, 116 Desain, Jacques, 25 Descartes, 165 Design for a Vase (Bouchet, after Boucher), 41 Dezallier d’Argenville, AntoineJoseph, 47, 49, 50; Conchyliologie nouvelle et portative, 47 Dictionnaire abregè (Marsy), 147 Dictionnaire de la marine (Aubin), 194 Diderot, Denis, 1–2, 8, 136, 137, 151 Doria, Arnauld, comte, 12

216

index Fabritius, Carel, Mercury and Argus, 39 Falconet, Étienne-Maurice, 151 fashion. See dress Favart, Charles-Simon, 33 ferme-ornée, 92, 106n28 Fiacre de Sainte-Marguerite, Frère, 70 Fire (Boucher), 42 Firedrake (bomb vessel), 194 Flahaut de la Billarderie, Charles Claude, Comte d’Angiviller, 149 Flemish art, 155n21 Flower, George, 101 Fontenelle, Bernard, Origin of the Fables, 160–61 Forfait, Pierre-Alexandre-Laurent, 188 Fournier, Father George, Hydrographie, 194 Fournier, Jean, 194 France (personification of), 139, 141, 147 French Academy (Academy), 14, 15, 26, 39; Salons of, 1, 8n4, 20, 40, 116, 120, 130n17, 136. See also Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture French funerary monument. See funerary monuments French Naval Council, 187 Fresnaye, Charles-Joseph de la, 119 Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden (Grignion, after Hogarth), xv, 3 Funerary Monument to Matthew Prior (Gibbs and Rysbrack), 148 Funerary Monument to the Archbishops Armand de Montmorin and Henri-Oswald de la Tour d’Auvergne (Slodtz), 140 Funerary Monument to the Cardinal de Fleury, 137

dress: role in performance of the self, 116; and age, 116, 122, 125; Geo∑rin’s and Leszczyn´ska’s choice of, 127 Drevet, Claude, 14 Drevet, Pierre-Imbert, 14 Drouais, François-Hubert, portrait of Pompadour, 124 Duhamel du Monceau, Henri-Louis, Elémens de l’architecture navale ou traité pratique de la construction des vaisseaux, 190 Duke of Cumberland, 65 Duplessis, Jean-Claude, 64 Dutch Two-Decker and Galjoot Lying by with the Fleet at Sea, A (van de Velde), 184 Duvaux, Lazare, 42 Duvivier, Jean, 14 Duvivier, Pierre-Simon-Benjamin, 14 Elémens de l’architecture navale ou traité pratique de la construction des vaisseaux (Duhamel du Monceau), 190 Emerson, William, 185 empire, 185, 192; and naval architecture, 203-4 engineering, nautical 189, 190, 194, 203; design, 185, 187 English Catholics, 60, 71–73 Enlightenment, 84, 101, 136, 137, 161; art, 1–8; ideals, 100, 106, 160; intellectual history of, 6; role of women in, 7; theories of time during, 101, 103 enslaved workers. See slavery Essai sur les jardins (Watelet), 2 Europeans, and non-Western peoples, 159–61, 164, 165, 170, 174; imitation of, 174–75. See also under Indigenous peoples evolution, 7, 8, 163, 167. See also progress exploration, 8, 159, 168

217

index garden design, 83, 85, 90, 92; eighteenth-century, 98; and the cosmopolitan ideal, 100 gender, 127 genre painting, 113–14 Geo∑rin, Marie-Thérèse, 7, 111–19, 120, 122, 125, 127, 128; as art collector, 119; drawing by Demarteau (after Cochin), 113, 115; portrait by Allais of, 117, 118, 122; portrait by Nattier of, 113, 114, 122; portraits of, 130n22; public cultivation of old age; 117–19, 128; salons of, 113, 116 geometry, of garden design and architecture, 85, 90; in shipbuilding, 186, 190 Germain, François-Thomas, 14, 20 German, William H., 186 Germann, Jennifer, 120 Gibbs, James (design), Funerary Monument to Matthew Prior, 148 Girardon, François, 69 Giroust, Marie-Suzanne, 26 Goiun, Charles, 64 Goncourt, Edmond and Jules, 38 Granado (bomb vessel), 198; drawing of, 196, 198, 207n33 Grand Gallery at the Louvre, 11, 14, 19, 33, 35, 149 Grand Tour, the, 69, 70 Grande Galerie. See Grand Gallery Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, Filial Piety, 127; The Well-Loved Mother, 127–28 Grignion, Charles, after William Hogarth, Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, xv, 3, 4, 9n15; Tailpiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, 3, 4, 5, 9n15 Grimm (fairy tales), 84 Grimou, Alexis, 22

Funerary Monument to the Cardinal Lorenzo Imperiali (Guidi), 146 Funerary Monument to the Countess Matilda of Canossa (Bernini), 142 Funerary Monument to the Dauphin and the Dauphine (Guillaume Coustou the Younger), 137 Funerary Monument to the First Duke of Marlborough (Kent and Rysbrack), 143 Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe [Marshal of Saxony] (Pigalle), 134, 135, 137–39, 138, 141, 147–52; commissioning of, 147, 154n13; innovations of, 139, 149–50; placement of, 151 Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Turenne, 141 Funerary Monument to the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von BadenBaden (Schütz and Heilmann), 144 funerary monuments: and arthistorical research, 135; context of creation and production of, 136; and Enlightenment ideas, 137; French, 135–52; and the histoire des mentalités, 135; honoring illustrious men and great deeds, 147–48, 152; as ideas made visible, 152; individual artist’s approach to, 137; and military monuments, 141; obelisks in, 139–40; personnel/ characters of, 141; portrayal of dying, 149, 151 Furttenbach, Joseph, Architectura Navalis, 190 galiote à bombes, 8, 185, 188, 193. See also bomb vessels galjoot, 185, 189, 191, 204. See also bomb vessels galliot, 193

218

index ideas and visibility. See visibility and ideas imitation. See under mimesis immortality, individualistic ideas toward, 135; in this world, 147, 149; in monuments to great men, 151 Indigenous culture, 159 Indigenous peoples: of America, 164, 165, 166; of Australia, 169; as Other to Europeans, 159–78, 183n78; visual representations of, 160, 164, 168–78. See also Aboriginal Australians innovations, in maritime technologies, 185, 197, 198 Interior of a Kitchen (Kalf), 39 invasion, 167, 178; and settlement (of Australia), 170 inventories, probate, 6, 12, 14, 20, 26 Iroquois people, 162, 163, 166, 175 Isis, 164

grotesque, the, 168, 170, 173, 175 Guidi, Domenico, 141, Funerary Monument to the Cardinal Lorenzo Imperiali, 146 Gui∑rey, Jules, 12 Guillerme, Jacques, 191 Hamon, Maurice, 117 Hariot, Thomas, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Vırginia, 163 Harvey, Mary Jackson, 136 Haulman, Kate, 82 Haynes, Clare, 66 Hedley, Jo, 42 Heilmann, Thomas (sculptor), Funerary Monument to the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von Baden-Baden, 144 Hercules, 139, 147 histoire des mentalités, 135, 136, 137 Historical Account of the Colony of New South Wales, An (Wallis and Lycett), 168 History of New France (Lescarbot), 162 Hogarth, William: 1, 3–4, 5, 8, 59; The Analysis of Beauty, 1, 2; Frontispiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden, 3. See also Grignion Hoorn, Jeanette, 171 horns, as example of link between cultures, 162–63, 164, 166, 175 house museums, 79, 83. See also Mount Vernon, Montpelier, Monticello, Poplar Forest Huhn, Tom, 3 Hunt, Margaret, 129n8 Huquier, Gabriel, 42, 43 Hyde de Neuville, Anne Marguerite, President James Madison’s House in Montpelier, 96, 97 Hydrographie (Fournier), 194

Je∑erson, Martha, 85 Je∑erson, Thomas, 7, 79–109; on America, 84; classical reading of, 101; cosmopolitanism, 100, 101; granddaughters of, 102–3; interest in architecture, 84; landscape gardens of, 84, 85, 100; Notes on the State of Vırginia, 79; on ideas of time, 84–85, 101, 105n24; and national identity, 84, 85. See also following entry Je∑erson, Thomas, residences of: Monticello, 7, 83, 84, 92, 97–98 (Mulberry Row), 100, 102; Poplar Forest, 7, 83, 84, 85–92, 100–103 Jesus (Christ), 69, 70 Jones, Colin, 122, 124 Julliot, Claude-François, 40 Jupiter Ammon, 162, 180n25

219

index Lemoyne, Jean-Baptiste II (the Younger), 21–22, 40; Monument to Louis XV for Rennes, 145 Lemoyne, Jean-Louis (father of Jean-Baptiste), 21 Lépicié, Élisabeth (after Charles Coypel), La Jeunesse sous les habillements de la Décrépitude, 125, 126 Leroy, Julien, 14 Les ports, havres et rivières navigables de Normandie dans l’enquête des amirautés de 1665 (Colbert), 192 Lescarbot, Marc, 162 Leszczyn´ska, Marie, Queen of France, 7, 111, 119–28; as a painter, 125; performance of age by, 122, 124–25; portrait by Nattier of, 120, 122, 123, 124–25; portrait by Van Loo of, 119–20, 121; portraits by Tocqué of, 25 Lilti, Antoine, 119 Lindfield, Peter, 73 Linnæus, Carl, Systema Naturae, 167 Lodgings of the Galleries of the Louvre and the Names of the Individuals Who Occupy Them (unknown draftsman), 10, 13 logements, at the Louvre, 11–26: decoration of, 12, 17–23, 25–26; plans of, 12–15, 17; prestige of, 12, 15; right of succession to, 12, 14. See also under Tocqué Louis XIII, 69, 70, 192 Louis XIV, 69, 71, 187 Louis XV, 15, 22, 112, 125, 137, 145 Louvre, the, 26n2; lodgings (logements) at, 6, 11–26 luxury: commodities, 73, 77n54; porcelain, 60 61, 64, 71, 72, 74n13 Lycett, Joseph, 168; album of drawings, 168–70, 173, 178; drawings in Album of Original

Kalf, Willem, Interior of a Kitchen, 39 Kent, William (design), Funerary Monument to the First Duke of Marlborough, 143 La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse (Surugue, after Coypel), 125, 110 La Jeunesse sous les habillements de la Décrépitue (Lépicié after Coypel), 125, 126 La Rue, Louis-Félix de, 40 La Tour, Maurice-Quentin de, 17, 20, 22 Lafitau, Joseph-François, 160, 162–66, 166, 174, 178, 180n23; Explanation of the Plates and Figures Contained in the Second Volume, 163; Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, 158, 162 Lambert, Madame de, 117, 118, 120, 122; salon of, 129n12, Traité de l’amout et l’amitié, 113, 117; Traité de la vieillesse, 117 landscape design. See garden design landscape(s): Australian, 168, 169, 173; and historic estates/houses, 82–83; in Je∑erson’s Notes on the State of Vırginia, 79–80; native American, 100; in presentation of American history, 83; views in circuit walks, 98; of Virginia, 85, 101. See also garden design; Poplar Forest Latrobe, John, 83 Lavanha, João Baptista, 190 Leclerc, Claire, 20 Lee, Robert, 194 Lefrançois, Thierry, 125 Lemée, François, Traite des statues, 147

220

index Melchior, Fredrich (Baron von Grimm), 1 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 111, 112, 117, 127 mimesis (imitation of nature), 2, 3, 4 Mniszech, Michel, 47 Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains compares aux moeurs des premiers temps (Lafitau), 162 Montagu, Elizabeth, 75n13 Monticello (Virginia), 78, 79, 81, 83, 92, 102; 1837 insurance map showing relationship between terrace corner and South Yard, 93; side terrace to South Yard, 94; view from side terrace down to South Yard, 95; view from the roof across the South Terrace, the first roundabout, Mulberry Row, and the kitchen garden, 98 Montpelier, 83, 92; performance of slave life at, 96 Monument to Louis XV for Rennes (Lemoyne), 145 Monument to the Families Keurlinckx/ van Delft (Scheemæckers), 141 Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe (Pigalle), 137 Mount Vernon, 83, 92 Mulberry Row, 92, 95, 106n28 mythical creatures, 7, 159, 161–62, 165 Mythology and Fables of the Ancients Explain’d from History (Banier), 161

Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, 171, 172, 175, 176 Lysimachus, 162 Madame de Pompadour. See Pompadour Madame Geo∑rin (Allais), 118 Madame Geo∑rin (Nattier), 114 Madison family, 96 Madison, Dolley, 96 Madison, James, 82, 83; Montpelier, 83–84, 92; Notes on the Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787, 82, 83 Mallett, John, 61 Man and a Youth Ploughing with Oxen, A (Berchem), 39 Mannlich, Johann Christian von, 47, 50 Maria Ecclesia, 70 Maria Vıctoria (Our Lady of Victories), 70 Marie Leszczyn´ska (Nattier), 123 Marie Leszczyn´ska (Van Loo), 121 Marigny, marquis de, 14, 15, 17, 147 maritime powers, 185, 191–92 Marsy, François-Marie de, Dictionnaire abregè, 147 Marteau, Louis, 117 Mason, Peter, 160, 175 Massé, Jean-Baptiste, 20, 33; Tocqué’s portrait of, 22; Wille’s portrait of (after Tocqué), 22 Maurice, Count of Saxony, Marshal of France, 137 Mazel, Claire, 136 McGee, David, 189 McLean, Ian, 167, 168 McMurran, Mary Helen, 159, 180n23 Meeting between St. Leo the Great and Attila, The (Algardi), 150 Meissen porcelain factory, 60, 62, 63, 65, 75n14

Naginski, Erika, 136 Napoleon, 11, 188 national identity, 84, 85, 103, 161 nationalism, 6; and cosmopolitanism in British art, 60, 73

221

index Pan, 162, 165 Panofsky, Erwin, 136 Papillon de La Ferte, Denis-PierreJean, 39 Philibert, Orry, 14 Phillipe II, duc d’Orléans, the French Regent, 162, 192 philosophes, 1, 135 philosophers: eighteenth-century, 1, 137, 151; Diderot, 1, 137 philosophy: of art, 2; of the Enlightenment, 3. See also aesthetics Picart, Bernard, Cérémonies et coûtumes religieuses de tous les peoples du monde, 160, 165–66 picturesque, the, 168, 171 Pietà: Chelsea Porcelain Factory, 67, 70; by Coustou, 70 Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste, 7, 15, 139–41, 147–52; Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe [Marshal of Saxony], 134, 135, 137–38, 138, 141, 147–52; Mercury, 15. See also Funerary Monument to the Maréchal de Saxe Piron, Alexis, 32 Plan au premier étage, de la distribution du Louvre, dans son état actuel, 37 Plan de la premier piece de l’attelier de Mr. Boucher au Louvre, 34 Plato, 160 Plinius (the Elder), Historia Naturalis, 160 Poissonades, 124 Pompadour, Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, marquise de, 32, 113, 122, 124, 132n42 Poplar Forest (Virginia), 79–103, 80; Je∑erson’s design for, 85, 90; mediating absolute and relative time, 102–3; neoclassical and geometric forms of, 100; orchard plantings, 85; as private retreat,

Nattier, Jean-Marc, 113, 117, 120; Madame Geo∑rin, 113, 114; Marie Leszczyn´ska, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 123; memoirs of (by his daughter Madame Tocqué), 25; Portrait of Louis Tocqué, 17, 18, 21, 25, 28n13, portrait of Madame de Pompadour as Diana, 124 nature, 3, 4, 90, 161, 169–70, 174, and civilization, 83; and art, 32, 35, 46–50, 52, 103; cultivated, 169–70, duality of time in, 101; illustrations of 172–73; natural vs visual worlds, 82 naval architecture, 8, 189, 190; 204; history of, 185; and architecture, 187, 189, 190 naval constructors, 186–89 naval vessels, 186–94, 197 navies (British, French, Dutch) 189, 192, 193, 199, 203 neoclassical architecture, 90, 100 neoclassicism, 101 New South Wales, 169, 172 non-Western peoples, as perceived by Europeans, 159–78 Notes on the Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 (Madison), 82 obelisks, 139–40 old age, 111; submitting to, 112–28; performance of, 113, 122; accessories of, 122. See also aging Ollivier, Blaise-Joseph, 193 Order of Saint Michael, 15 Origin of the Fables (Fontenelle), 160–61 Origin of the Species, The (Darwin), 167 Oudry, Jean-Baptiste, 42 Paixhan, Henri-Joseph, 204 Pajou, Augustin, A Cupid Eating Grapes, 40

222

index Portsmouth (bomb vessel), 194 Pratt, Stephanie, 162, 163 President James Madison’s House in Montpelier (Hyde de Neuville), 97 prestige. See status Preston, Walter, 168 Pritchard, James, 194 progress, European/colonial ideas about, 7, 160, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167, 169, 178 Prohengues, Marquis de, 147 Protestantism, and antiGallicanism, 65 Ptolemy, maps of, 166

85; slave quarters at, 90–92; tree plantings, 90; views from, 105n26. See also following entry Poplar Forest, photographs of: roof of the wing of o≈ces, 87; terrace access door from bedroom (exterior side), 89; terrace access door from bedroom (interior side), 88; view from the loggia of the south façade, 86; view toward the Blue Ridge Mountains from the roof of the wing of o≈ces, 91 porcelain, British: anti-Catholic reference in, 65; French sources for, 71; link to Roman Catholicism, 71; quality vs imports, 62, 63. See also Chelsea Porcelain Factory porcelain: bust of Duke of Cumberland, 65; Continental, 59–73; images of the Pietà and the Vırgin and Child; industry, 60 Portrait of Jean-Marc Nattier (Tocqué), 23 Portrait of Louis Tocqué (Cathelin after Nattier), 24 Portrait of Louis Tocqué (Nattier), 18 portraitists: Aved, 14, 122; Allais, 117, 122; Cathelin, 25; Cochin, 113; Drouais, 124; La Tour, 22; Lemoyne, 22; Marteau, 117; Nattier, 25, 113; Roslin, 26; Tocqué, 12, 17, 22; Van Dyck, 22; Van Loo, 119–20. See also under entries for individual artists Portraits Flanked by Two Botanical Drawings (Wallis and Lycett), 170, 169 portraits, medallion, 116; genre, 120 portraiture, 122, 128; allegorical, 113; genre of, 26; and likeness 112, role of dress in, 116

races (human), ideas about, 159 Radisich, Paula, 123 Randolph, Cornelia and Ellen. See under Cornelia and Ellen Raphael, 68; Chigi Chapel, 139 Réau, Louis, 136 recusant elite, English, 6, 60, 71, 72 religion: and death, 149; and sculpture, 66, 68, 70–72; Christianity, 173; English religious art, 59; in Indigenous cultures, 160–62; in America, 84 Remsen, Henry, 102 Rémy, Pierre, 39, 46, 47, 50 Renau d’Elissagaray, Bernard, 192 Reni, Guido, 68 Restout, Jean, 20 Reynolds, Joshua: Discourses, 2–3 Richelieu, Cardinal, 192 Robinson, John Martin, 92 Roman Catholic. See Catholic rosa mystica, 69, 70 Roslin, Alexandre, 26 Roubiliac, Louis-François, 64 Rouquet, André, 17, 20 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 167 Rubens, Peter Paul, 69

223

index shipbuilding, 188, 193, 203; and geometry, 186, 190; theory of, 193 shipwrights, 185–89, 197; apprentices to, 186 Silvestre, Israël, 35 Silvestre, Louis de, 17, 20, 28n15 Silvestre, Nicolas, 35 Simon, Robin, 59 slavery and slaves, 82, 85, 90–92, 102, 106n28; presented as part of landscape, 97–98; visibility in historic estates, 92. See also Mulberry Row; South Yard Slodtz, Michel-Ange, Funerary Monument to the Archbishops Armand de Montmorin and Henri-Oswald de la Tour d’Auvergne, 140 Smith, Bernard, 167, 172 Smith, Margaret Bayard, 82, 83, 84, 102 Souchal, François, 136 South Yard, 92. See also Monticello Southcote, Philip, 99 Souvenirs (Vigée-Lebrun), 116 Spahn, Hannah, 100 Sprimont, Nicholas, 61, 64, 66; religious ideology of, 64–65, 66 Square Court (the Louvre). See Cour Carrée Sta∑ord, Barbara, 4 Stanislaus II August Poniatowski, King of Poland, 119 status (prestige): lack of social, 129; by living space, 12; of Louvre logements, 12, 20; of possessions and relationships, 12, 22; through portraiture, 29n26; of Tocqué, 20–21, 25, 27 Stewart, Joan Hinde, 111, 117 Stuart, Charles Edward, the Young Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Tocqué painting of, 22, 25

Rysbrack, Michael (sculptor), Funerary Monument to the First Duke of Marlborough, 143; Funerary Monument to Matthew Prior, 148 Saint-Armand, Arthur-Léon Imbert de, 124 Saint-Aubin, Augustin de (after Gabriel de Saint-Aubin), Engraving, 48 Saint-Aubin, Gabriel, 49 Saint-Florentin, comte de, 22 Salamander (bomb vessel), 194; drawing of, 195 Salmon, Xavier, 113 salonniéres, 7, 113, 116–17, 119, 129n12 Salons (French Academy), 1, 8n4, 20, 40, 119, 120, 130n17, 136 Santerre, Jean-Baptiste, 22 satyrs, 164, 165, 166, 175 “savage” vs “civilized”, 7, 159–78 Scheemæckers, Peter (the Elder), Monument to the Families Keurlinckx/van Delft, 141 Scherf, Guilhem, 136 Schütz, Johann (design) Funerary Monument to the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm von BadenBaden, 144 Scotin, Gérard Jean-Baptiste, illustration for Moeurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (Lafitau), 158 Scott, Katie, 43 Scrivener, Michael Henry, 100 sculpture of the ancient régime, vs painting, 136 Sculpture, and idolatry, 68 Serpent (bomb vessel), 197, 199; drawing of, 200 Seven Years’ War, 63, 192

224

index (Copenhagen), Sweden (Stockholm), Paris, 12, 17, 25, 28n13; valuation of e∑ects of, 28n17; works of art owned by, 21–22, 25. See also following two entries Tocqué, Louis, Louvre logement: layout of, 17–21; furnishings and decoration of, 12, 20–22, 25 Tocqué, Madame (Marie-CatherinePauline Nattier), 20, 21, 120; death of, 26; decoration of Louvre logement by, 25; probate inventory of, 26, in Russia and Denmark, 25; valuation of e∑ects of, 26 tombs. See funerary monuments Traité de l’amout et l’amitié (Lambert), 113, 117 Traité de la vieillesse (Lambert), 117 Traite des statues (Lemée), 147 Traité du navire (Bouguer), 190 Trist, Elizabeth, 79 Triumph of Venus (Boucher), 51 Trollope, Anthony, 178 Troyansky, David, 127 truth, concept of, 3, 161 Tyson, Edward, Orang-Outang, 161

studio, the, and artistic invention, 31 Surugue, Louis, after Charles Coypel, La Folie pare la Décrépitude des ajustements de la Jeunesse, 125, 110 Sydney Gazette, 168, 170 Systema Naturae (Linnæus), 167 Tailpiece to the Catalogue of Pictures Exhibition in Spring Garden (Grignion, after Hogarth), 3, 4, 5, 9n15 technological revisioning, 189, 192, 203–4 technology, 8; transnational, 185–204; history of 188; role of imitation in, 187 Tencin, Madame de, 113, 119 Teniers II, David, 39–40, Peasants by an Inn Fire, 39–40 terra incognita, 166 Tessin, comte de, 39 The Bird Trap, The (Aveline), 43 The Half Has Never Been Told (Baptist), 82 Thunder (bomb vessel), 197, 199 time, ideas of, 84, 101–3, 107n40; and the American landscape, 90 Titon du Tillet, Evrard, 149 Tocqué, Louis, 6, 12–26; attempts to secure a Louvre logement, 12–17; death of, 12, 25; income of, 17, 20; member of Danish Academy, 21; member of French Academy, 14; portrait commissions, 22, 25; portrait of Jean-Louis Lemoyne, 21; Portrait of Jean-Marc Nattier, 21, 23; portrait of the comte de Saint-Florentin, 22; portrait of Queen Marie Leszczyn´ska, 25; probate inventory of, 12, 14, 20, 26; travel to and work in Russia (Saint Petersburg), Denmark

Unknown draftsman, Lodgings of the Galleries of the Louvre and the Names of the Individuals Who Occupy Them, 10, 13 van de Velde, Adriaen, 39 van de Velde, Willem, 191; A Dutch Two-Decker and Galjoot Lying by with the Fleet at Sea, 184 van der Heyden, Jan, 39 Van Dyck, Anthony, 22 Van Loo, Carle, 70, 119–20; Marie Leszczyn´ska, 121 Vassé, Louis-Claude, 40 Vauxhall gardens, 3, 4

225

index of Original Drawings by Captain James Wallis and Joseph Lycett, 171, 172, 175, 176 War of Spanish Succession, 197 War of the Austrian Succession, 137, 192 wars, and bomb vessels, 193, 197–98, 204 Watelet, Claude-Henri: Essai sur les jardins, 2 Webber, John, 171 Weinshenker, Anne Betty, 136 White, John, 163 Wille, Jean-Georges, engraving of Jean-Baptiste Massé (after Tocqué), 22; portrait of comte ds Saint-Florentin (after Tocqué), 22 Willems, Joseph, 61, 65, 66; Roman Charity, 68; Pietà group, 73 Woburn Farm, 98–100 women, aging, 7–8, 111–28; stereotypes of, 112; in French society, 112; and propriety, 124; vanity of, 124–25 words and images: tension between, 3, 4. See also visibility and ideas works of art. See artworks World War II, 204 Wouwerman, Philip, A Nobleman’s Sleigh on the Ice, 39

Vaz da Silva, Francisco, 162 Venus, in Boucher works, 31, 52, 53n1 Vérin, Hélène, 191 Verrue, Comtesse de, 39 Vesuvius (drawing of bomb vessel), 201 Vıew of Awakbal People (Wallis and Lycett), 174 Vigée-Lebrun, Élizabeth, 116 Vincennes-Sèvres porcelain factory, 60, 62, 63, 64 Vırgin and Child, The (Chelsea Porcelain Factory), 58, 66, 70 Virgin Mary, 69, 70 visibility of ideas, 1–4, 6–8 Vitruvius, principles of, 190, 191 Vıew of a River Landscape with Five Cut Out Pasted Down Drawings of Five Standing Aborigines (Wallis and Lycett), 176 Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People (Wallis and Lycett), 177 Vıew of Awabakal Aboriginal People with Beach and River Inlet and Distant Aboriginal Group in Background (Wallis and Lycett), 173 Voltaire, 147, 151, 156n28, 180n23 Vovelle, Michel, 137 Vow of Louis XIII, 70 Wallis Album, the, 166–78 Wallis, James (captain), 168–69, 173–74, 178; drawings in Album

Young, Hilary, 65, 66 Zeus. See under Jupiter Ammon

226